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Abstract
In this paper I make connections between two domains of information, research on the semantics/pragmatics debate and on modularity of mind, in the hope that establishing connections and parallel structure may be fruitful in deepening knowledge of the interface between semantics and pragmatics. In particular I want to inquire if modularity of mind can help us move towards the resolution of important theoretical problems like Grice's circle, the cancellability of explicatures/implicatures, the analogy between perceptual enrichments and explicatures due to free enrichments, the routing problem for explicatures (do they strictly take input from implicatures?), and satisficing strategies in pragmatic interpretation.
Acknowledgements
I would like to give my warmest thanks to Jacob L. Mey, Yan Huang, K. Jaszczolt, I. Kecskes, S. Blackwell, M. Seymour, James Higginbotham Ernie Lepore,Franco Lo Piparo and Noel Burton-Roberts.
Notes
1A module on the fly is a module that limits the information that can be searched in order to arrive at a certain interpretation. For example, consider the case ‘The surgeon was ready to operate on John. And he was ready to be operated on’. The module on the fly posited by Sperber and Wilson restricts the database where referents can be searched to the entities mentioned in the module [The surgeon was ready to operate on John]—as conversation proceeds further, further modules are built on the fly, which are very local in nature.
2An interesting potential objection is the following. In the case of Grice's well-known example (A: Has John got a girlfriend? B: He has travelled to London very frequently recently) the implicature that John has got a girlfriend in London can be cancelled by adding ‘I don't intend to mean that he has got a girlfriend in London’. This is surely a case of weak commitment of an implicature (not to mention the vagueness of the implicature; a lot more could be implied as well, and it is NOT clear here that a certain intention can be pinned down uniquely). It is, of course, worth mentioning that there are cases like these, but I want to point out that the most compelling cases for explicature (those that allow one to argue for pragmatic intrusion into truth-conditional meaning) are not of this type. In connection with those cases, I argued in Capone (2006) that they cannot be cancelled.
3Keith Allan suggests (p.c.) that there are exceptions, as even unintended implicatures can arise, albeit they are unusual. I am inclined to agree with Keith Allan. If we could make records of what speakers intended and what hearers took as intended by the speakers, we would probably be confronted with different records. Especially reflective implicatures (non-automatic inferential processes) may be associated with different records of what was intended and what was taken as being intended. Suppose that I am too prolix in my way of saying something, but I do not recognize this prolixity, suppose I am simply thinking aloud and voicing unnecessary verbal materials without realizing that I am voicing them. Then the hearer will tend to make sense of my prolixity by working out an implicature which I did not intend to get across. However, I wonder whether implicature is the right word here. There is an inferential process, surely, but I wonder if it reconstructs an intended implicature. There is also the case in which my way of saying something implicates that P, even if surely I would not want my hearer to take me as intending to get across that P. For instance, I may issue an invitation to my friend, but my way of issuing the invitation lets my friend understand that this is not the right moment for me to invite him. He knows that I have recently had serious health problems and he takes the fact that my invitation was not very warm and firm to imply that I am not prepared for having guests at this moment of my life. Yet, I would not easily admit that I intended to get across this implicature. Marginal though they are, these cases should be discussed.
4Responding to an important comment by a referee, I found it important to say that explicatures are entailment-like, even if not exactly entailments.