Word Meaning , What is Said , and Explicature

In his logic of conversation, Paul Grice made an important distinction between two kinds of act that speakers may perform when uttering a sentence and, correspondingly, two kinds or levels of speaker meaning: (i) saying, hence what is said, and (ii) implicating, hence what is implicated (implicature) (Grice 1975). The distinction between what is said and what is implicated can be seen as one instantiation of a distinction between the explicit content of an utterance and its implicit import. This distinction, albeit with numerous modifications and extensions, has proved indispensable to all subsequent attempts to account for speaker meaning, communicated content and utterance interpretation. It is generally agreed, however, that in his few characterisations of ‘what is said’, Grice underestimated the extent to which context/pragmatics can contribute to a hearer’s recovery of this level of content. He maintained that ‘what someone has said [is] closely related to the conventional meaning of the words (the sentence) he has uttered’ (1975: 44), and, beyond conventional linguistic meaning, he explicitly acknowledged only the need to identify the reference of pronouns, the time of utterance, and the intended sense of any ambiguous words or phrases (1975: 44). In the meantime, a plethora of linguistic phenomena has been put forward as requiring or, at least, allowing for further contextual/pragmatic effects at the level of explicit utterance content. These include the following: (i) cases of syntactically complete but semantically non-propositional sentences, e.g. ‘Jane is ready’, ‘Bill is tall enough’; (ii) cases of (apparently) unarticulated constituents of content, e.g. the location constituent usually inferred for utterances of ‘It is raining’, the cause-consequence constituent often inferred for conjunctive utterances such as ‘Jane did Bill’s lectures and he recommended her for promotion’; (iii) the modulation of word meaning, e.g. colour terms as in ‘red bird’, ‘red house’, ‘red pen’, ‘red crystal’, ‘red hair’, and so on; (iv) more controversially, certain kinds of non-literal uses (metaphorical or metonymic) of words, e.g. ‘John is a saint’, ‘Mary is a butterfly’, ‘The mushroom omelette wants her bill’. It has been suggested that, if he had considered the matter in more detail, Grice would not have been averse to including at least some of these kinds of pragmatic contributions in what is required for a full identification of what the speaker has said (Wharton 2002, Stephen Neale (pc)). This may be so for semantically incomplete sentences as in (i) above: Grice might have agreed to add to what is required for a full identification of what