Reflections on Jennifer Saul's View of Successful Communication and Conversational Implicature

نوع مقاله : مقاله علمی پژوهشی

نویسنده

Ph.D. Candidate, Institute of Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM), Tehran, Iran.

چکیده

Saul (2002) criticizes a view on the relationship between speaker meaning and conversational implicatures according to which speaker meaning is exhaustively comprised of what is said and what is implicated. In the course of making her points, she develops a couple of new notions which she calls “utterer-implicature” and “audience-implicature”. She then makes certain claims about the relationship between the intersection of those two notions and successful communication and also about the difference between conversational implicature and the intersection of utterer and audience implicatures. Finally, she tries to figure out the role and importance of conversational implicature in communication. Her claim on this issue is that conversational implicature plays a normative role in communication. In this paper, I will introduce her views on the above issues and critically engage some of them. I will show that her identification of successful communication with the intersection of utterer and audience implicatures is wrong. I will then show that her views on the difference between conversational implicature and the intersection of utterer and audience implicature run to several problems. Finally, appealing to what she says in Saul (2010) I try to make her claim about the normative character of conversational implicature more accurate.

کلیدواژه‌ها


عنوان مقاله [English]

Reflections on Jennifer Saul's View of Successful Communication and Conversational Implicature

نویسنده [English]

  • Seyyed Abbas Kazemi Oskooei
Ph.D. Candidate, Institute of Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM), Tehran, Iran.
چکیده [English]

Saul (2002) criticizes a view on the relationship between speaker meaning and conversational implicatures according to which speaker meaning is exhaustively comprised of what is said and what is implicated. In the course of making her points, she develops a couple of new notions which she calls “utterer-implicature” and “audience-implicature”. She then makes certain claims about the relationship between the intersection of those two notions and successful communication and also about the difference between conversational implicature and the intersection of utterer and audience implicatures. Finally, she tries to figure out the role and importance of conversational implicature in communication. Her claim on this issue is that conversational implicature plays a normative role in communication. In this paper, I will introduce her views on the above issues and critically engage some of them. I will show that her identification of successful communication with the intersection of utterer and audience implicatures is wrong. I will then show that her views on the difference between conversational implicature and the intersection of utterer and audience implicature run to several problems. Finally, appealing to what she says in Saul (2010) I try to make her claim about the normative character of conversational implicature more accurate.

کلیدواژه‌ها [English]

  • Grice
  • conversational implicature
  • utterer-implicature
  • audience-implicature
  • successful communication
  • normativity
Davis, W. (1998). Implicature: Intention, Convention, and Principle in the Failure of Gricean Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Davis, W. (2007). How Normative is Implicature? Journal of Pragmatics, 39(10), 1655–1672. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2007.05.006
Davis, W. (2019). Implicature, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), (E. N. Zalta, Ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/implicature/>.
Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Korta, K., & Perry, J. (2020). Pragmatics, The Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition).(E. N. Zalta Ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/pragmatics/>.
Petrus, K. (2010). Meaning and Analysis, New Essays on Grice. Palgrave.
Saul, J. (2002). Speaker Meaning, What is Said, and What is Implicated. Nous 36(2), 228–248. doi: 10.1111/1468-0068.00369
Saul, J. (2010). Speaker-Meaning, Conversational Implicature, and Calculability. In Klaus Petrus (Ed.) Meaning and Analysis, New Essays on Grice. Palgrave.
CAPTCHA Image