The Border Wars: A Neo-Gricean Perspective

In reports Þled from several fronts in the semantics/pragmatics border wars, I seek to bolster the loyalist (neo-)Gricean forces against various recent revisionist sorties, including (but not limited to) the relevance-theoretic view on which the maxims (or more speciÞcally their sole surviving descendant, the principle of relevance) inform truthconditional content through the determination of “explicatures”, Levinson’s defense of implicatures serving as input to logical form, recent arguments by Mira Ariel for a semantic treatment of the upper bound (‘not all’) for propositions of the formMost F are G, and Chierchia’s proposal to reanalyze implicatures as part of compositional semantics. I argue for drawing the semantics/pragmatics boundary in a relatively traditional way, maintaining a constrained characterization of what is said, while adopting a variant of Kent Bach’s position on “impliciture” and supporting the Gricean conception of implicature as an aspect of speaker meaning, as opposed to its reconstruction in terms of default inference or utterance interpretation. I survey current controversies concerning the meaning and acquisition of disjunction and other scalar operators, the relation of subcontrariety and its implications for lexicalization, the nature of polarity licensing, and the innateness controversy. In each case, I seek to emphasize the signiÞcance of the generalizations that a (neo-)classical pragmatic approach enables us to capture. For some time, David Kaplan (cf. Kaplan 1978:223) has taken to harking nostalgically back to the Golden Age of Pure Semantics, which reached its apotheosis with the theory of extension and intension in Carnap’s (1947)Meaning and Necessity before the tarnish from the ravages of proper names and demonstratives inevitably set in. Following Kaplan’s lead, I will dub the traditional pre-lapsarian pragmatic theory, on which non-truth-conditional aspects of meaning are read off the output of semantically interpreted logical form, the Golden Age of Pure Pragmatics, a.k.a. GAPP (see e.g. Grice [1967] 1989, Horn 1972, 1973, Gazdar 1979, Levinson 1983, Hirschberg 1991). My survey of the borderlands where semantics meets pragmatics begins with the relevancetheoretic (e.g. Sperber & Wilson, Carston) view on which the maxims (or more speciÞcally their sole surviving descendant, the principle of relevance) inform truth-conditional content through the determination of “explicatures” and Levinson’s framework on which implicatures serve as input to logical form. 1 Implicature, explicature, and propositional content As is well known, GAPP advocates a general account of scalar values as lower-bounded by their literal meaning (what is said) and upper-bounded by quantity-based implicature. Thus the “one-sided” meanings delivered by the linguistic semantics is Þlled in to yield the “two-sided” communicated understandings in the examples in (1):