A Study Of Explicature

Motivated by the underdeterminacy thesis that natural-language sentences do not fully encode the propositions they are used to express, the thesis discusses explicature in utterance interpretation from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics. In the light of the framework of relevance theory, the thesis attempts to account for relevance-theoretic conception of explicature and have a systematic demonstration of explicature interpretation. Among two categories of utterance meaning, implicature enjoys a long-standing focus in pragmatics while few studies are engaged in explicature. However, it is relevance theory that breaks through the bias. On the basis of relevance theory, the thesis discusses how explicature plays its role in utterance interpretation.Explicature, the relevance-theoretic term of proposition expressed by an utterance, has several isotopic terms in other theories, such as what is said originated by Grice, impliciture by Bach and Recanati's enriched'what is said'. The thesis summarizes research results of traditional views about proposition expressed and analyzes their insufficiencies. Grice's what is said, minimally departing from the linguistically encoded meaning, is closely constrained by the latter. The small gap between them is bridged by disambiguation and reference assignment. What is said, which depends on context rather than pragmatic inference guided by conversational maxims, contributes to the truth conditions of an utterance. Recanati thinks that pragmatic inference plays an important role in the recovery of what is said. What he addresses is enriched'what is said', which, besides disambiguation and reference assignment, involves embellishment of the proposition of an utterance. This embellishment consists of two processes of saturation and enrichment. The former refers to a process linguistically mandated by semantic incompleteness in an utterance, while the latter means a process triggered by pragmatic acceptability. Taking an approach opposite to Recanati's, Bach reduces what is said to a semantic-oriented concept, and meanwhile, constructs a level of impliciture between what is said and implicature. Impliciture is entitled to be the result of completion and expansion, two processes which are actually similar to saturation and enrichment by Recanati. However, they each have their own limitations. Grice's theory falls into what Levinson calls'Grice's circle'in that it cannot explain'pragmatic intrusion into what is said'. Moreover, the truth conditions of an utterance may not be exhausted only by the output of disambiguation and reference assignment. Recanati believes that derivation of proposition expressed and that of implicature belong to two...