The Role of Context in Interpreting Implicit Meaning Aspects

In my talk, I will propose that one source of information the interpretation process makes use of in determining the meaning of an utterance are conceptual frames which are evoked in the hearer by the expressions used in the utterance. The frames provide potential discourse referents in the form of thematic roles which may or may not get further specified in the course of interpreting an utterance or text. More generally, I want to suggest that the idea of conceptual frames being evoked during interpretation can be used to model (at least in part) a particular type of context, namely the ‘background’ against which a given utterance is interpreted. It is this background that provides the basis for understanding utterances as expressing more than what is explicitly stated (i.e. Relevance Theory’s explicature; Bach’s impliciture). One particular group of implicit meaning aspects (IMAs) – Levinson’s (2000) I-implicatures – has been tested by Garrett and Harnish (2007, 2008, 2009). Their results indicate that Iimplicatures arise out of any particular context and that they arise even in contexts where they clearly are not intended. These characteristics cannot be explained by an approach that assumes that IMAs are the result of a solely context-driven pragmatic process that takes into account assumptions concerning potential speaker intentions (e.g. Relevance Theory’s free enrichment process). In contrast, an approach where the interpretation of such IMAs is based on information from conceptual frames considered by default, does capture these characteristics. Consider, e.g., (1), which – out of a context – is usually interpreted as expressing (2).