Formal Pragmatics of Non Literal Meaning*

In the past decades, there has been much progress in the formal Semantics of ordinary language. Logicians, linguists and philosophers have extensively used logical formalisms in order to interpret directly or after translation important fragments of actual natural languages. They have thereby contributed to the foundations of the theory of sentence meaning. In formal Semantics, speaker meaning is reduced to sentence meaning: one assumes that speakers only mean what they say. Thus, formal semantics is a theory of literal meaning. However, in ordinary conversations, the speaker's meaning is often different from the sentence meaning. First, the primary illocutionary act that the speaker attempts to perform is different from the literal speech act expressed by the uttered sentence in the cases of metaphor, irony and indirect speech acts. Whenever the speaker indirectly requests the hearer to pass the salt by asking "Can you pass the salt?", the primary speech act of the utterance is the indirect request and not the literal question about the hearer's abilities. Second, the speaker means to perform secondary non literal illocutionary acts in the cases of conversational implicatures. By saying "If you are nice, I will give you something" the speaker can imply conversationally that he will not give anything to the hearer if he is not nice. In such a case, he makes a secondary non literal assertion in addition to the primary conditional promise. The speaker's capacity to make and understand non literal speech acts is clearly part of his linguistic competence. But it exceeds the capacity of understanding the sentence meaning. The study of non literal speech acts and conversational implicatures is part of the task of pragmatics. It deals with questions such as these: (1) How does a speaker succeed in getting the hearer to understand that what he means is different from what the sentence that he uses means? (2) Once the hearer has understood this, how does he succeed in identifying the intended non literal speech acts? Until the present, there has been little progress in the development of a formal pragmatics. Grice (1975) later joined by Searle (1979), Bach and Harnish, Récanati, Dascal and others made important remarks on non literal speaker meaning by exploring the idea that language use Is governed by conversational maxims (like "Speak the truth!", "Be sincere!") which the speaker can exploit in order to get the hearer to understand what he means. Sperber and Wilson have studied the maxim of relevance. But these current analyses of speaker