An Experimental Pragmatic Study On Conversational Impliciture

A fundamental assumption in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology is that what speakers say often underdetermines what they mean to communicate by an utterance, and conveys implicit or implicated meaning by nonliteral use of sentence. Different authors(Sperber and Wilson 1986, Carston 1988, Recanati 1989, Bach 1994, Levinson 2000) have reformulated Grice’s(1975,1989) speaker meaning theory and defended different notions(explicature, impliciture, implicature) to account for the phenomenon labeled as Gneralized Conversational Implicature(GCI).After a brief review of these debates, we will offer some arguments for treating some of these cases as impliciture, similar to Bach’s notion. However, we intend to improve this theory, based on a new perspective, and make a clear distinction between impliciture and other related notions.Next, we will illustrate some views on the awareness and interpretation of impliciture. Gricean theorists assume that people should find it easy to make distinction between impliciture and explicature or implicature. On the other hand, Relevance theorists suppose that impliciture is consciously available. A series of experiments, conserning this issue have produced mixed results. In this this paper we conduct two experiments to examine(1) Can people recognize impliciture from among the pragmatic determined aspects of meaning? If so(2) What role does it play in inferring implicature? The data from our experiments show that people can be consciously aware of the difference between impliciture and others, and impliciture plays an important intermediary role in recovering speaker’s implicated meaning. So, these findings yield substantial support for relevance theory over the accounts of PostGriceans.Finally, we introduce two competing processing models of impliciture, the Default Model and the Underspecified Model, by then, we design our third experiment to test(3) the pragmatic processing model is more suitable for mechanism of meaning recovering in our daily language communication. Our results from this experiment lend some initial support to the Default Model.However, we conclude with the suggestion that the debate between Gricean Theory and Relevance Theory is unresolvable via presumption following from these empirical approaches unless both theories relatively loosen their strict frameworks.