‘Free’ enrichment and the nature of pragmatic constraints

Contextualist theories of utterance interpretation posit a process of free pragmatic enrichment that contributes ‘unarticulated constituents’ of the explicit content of utterances. In this paper, I address the main concern about this process, which is that it is not sufficiently constrained, and appears to allow for enrichments that clearly do not occur. One variety of this overgeneration objection is that the contextualist seems to incorrectly predict that extra propositions and semantic arguments and predicates can be composed into explicit content, and the first part of the paper responds to this charge. The explanation turns on the fact that enrichment is a local (non-global) process, while complete propositions, arguments and so on, are derived by global inferences, so that the latter are properly inferentially warranted and can function independently as premises or conclusions in inferences. I also suggest that, from this distinction between global and local pragmatic processes, there follows a further constraint on enrichment, which is that, in contrast to conversational implicatures, unarticulated constituents cannot consist of information that is ‘at issue’ in the context of utterance. I go on to discuss the more general issue of how much systematicity is required, and what kinds of predictions and explanations should be expected from a contextualist account. The main point is that the criticisms rest on a failure to properly appreciate how the occurrence or non-occurrence of such free, or ‘optional’, pragmatic processes depends on the details of the particular context, including the clues provided by the linguistic form. When the context-specific nature of the process is taken into account, it can be seen to be sufficiently constrained by pragmatic mechanisms and to have the requisite explanatory power. ∗ This is a preliminary version of a paper that revises and expands material from my UCL PhD dissertation. Thanks to Robyn Carston, Rob Stainton, and Catherine Wearing for their comments. The research was initially supported by an AHRC doctoral award, and currently by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. Constraints on ‘free’ enrichment 94