Implicature and Explicature

3.
Implicature and explicature

Robyn Carston and Alison Hall1
1. Introduction
The explicature/implicature distinction is one manifestation of the distinction be-

tween the explicit content of an utterance and its implicit import. On certain ‘mini-
malist’ approaches, the explicit/implicit distinction is equated with the semantics/
pragmatics distinction or with Paul Grice’s saying/implicating distinction. How-
ever, the concept of ‘explicature’, which belongs to the relevance-theoretic prag-
matic framework, has closer affinities with the wider ‘contextualist’ perspective,
according to which context-sensitive pragmatic processes make a much greater
contribution to the proposition explicitly communicated than merely resolving am-
biguities and providing referents for indexicals. Crucially, there are pragmatic pro-
cesses of meaning enrichment and adjustment which have no linguistic mandate
but are wholly motivated by considerations of communicative relevance. Two con-
sequences of this are that (a) explicit utterance content can include constituents
which are not articulated in the linguistic form of the utterance, and (b) certain
Gricean implicatures are reanalysed as components of the explicitly communi-
cated truth-conditional content. In this chapter, we outline the explicature/implica-
ture distinction and highlight some of the issues it raises for semantic/pragmatic
theorizing.
To get a preliminary idea of how the distinction between implicature and expli-
cature works, consider what Amy communicates in the following exchange:
(1) Max: How was the party? Did it go well?
Amy: There wasn’t enough drink and everyone left early.
(2) T HE PARTY DID NOT GO WELL 2
It seems fairly clear that she is communicating (2). This is not something she says
explicitly; rather, it is an indirect or implied answer to Max’s question – a conver-
sational implicature, as such implicitly communicated propositions are known.
The hearer (Max) derives this implicated meaning by inferring it from the proposi-
tion which is more directly and more explicitly communicated by Amy, together
with his readily available assumptions about the characteristics of successful ver-
sus unsuccessful parties (e.g. people tend to leave early when a party isn’t very
good). What is the more directly communicated proposition, the ‘explicature’ of
the utterance? One possibility is that it is simply the linguistically encoded mean-
ing of the sentence that she uttered, so it is the conjunction of the context-free
meaning of the two simple sentence types:
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48 Robyn Carston and Alison Hall
(3) (i) T HERE WASN ’ T ENOUGH DRINK (ii) E VERYONE LEFT EARLY
This is, undeniably, the most explicit component of the meaning of Amy’s utter-
ance, but it is very unclear what exactly it amounts to and it seems to lack the spe-
cificity of the understood content. For instance, the extension of the noun drink in-
cludes green tea, tap water, and medicines in liquid form, to mention but a few of
the many drinks which are unlikely to be relevant in the context of Amy’s utter-
ance. Similarly, the linguistically encoded meaning of the bare quantifier everyone
includes many people whom Amy has no intention of denoting. In the context of
the dialogue above, it is clear that she intends to convey that everyone who came to
the particular party that Max asked her about left that party early.
So, although the linguistic expressions employed by Amy, the words she ac-
tually uttered, have a meaning and that meaning is, arguably, the most explicit
meaning that her utterance provides, it seems to be quite remote from the proposi-
tion that Max is likely to take her to have directly communicated (to have said,
stated, or asserted). That seems to be more like the content in (4) (where the ele-
ments highlighted in bold all go beyond the encoded meaning of the linguistic ex-
pressions uttered):
(4) T HERE WASN ’ T ENOUGH ALCOHOLIC DRINK TO SATISFY THE PEOPLE AT THE
PARTY I AND SO EVERYONE WHO CAME TO THE PARTY I LEFT IT I EARLY.
This is the proposition on the basis of which Amy’s utterance would be judged as
true or false, would be agreed or disagreed with (‘Yes, there was so little alcohol
that we all had to go off to the pub’, or ‘No, not everyone left the party early and
those who did had an exam the next morning’). Notice also that it is this proposi-
tion (and not the very general encoded linguistic meaning) which plays the crucial
role of premise in the reasoning process which leads to the implicated conclusion
that the party didn’t go well. We take it that this (or something very similar to it) is
the explicature of Amy’s utterance.
The distinction between two kinds of communicated propositions, explicatures
and implicatures, has been developed within the relevance-theoretic account of
communication and utterance interpretation (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995; Car-
ston 2002; Wilson and Sperber 2004). This framework is resolutely cognitive-
scientific in orientation: the central notion of informational ‘relevance’ which
drives the account is defined in terms of the positive cognitive implications that a
new input has in a cognitive system weighted against the costs (in such resources
as attention, inferential effort, etc.) that it imposes on that system. The greater the
range of cognitive implications and the lower their cost, the more the relevance of
the input. Verbal utterances and other kinds of ostensive communicative acts are
special inputs in that there is an inevitable presumption that they will be ‘optimally
relevant’, that is, they will provide at least a sufficient array of cognitive impli-
cations and other positive cognitive effects to offset the processing effort they

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Implicature and explicature 49
require.3 It is in the (non-demonstrative) inferential process of looking for an inter-

pretation consistent with this presumption that a hearer derives an explicature, by
enriching and modulating the conceptual schema provided by decoded linguistic
meaning. This occurs in parallel with the derivation of implicatures (cognitive im-
plications manifestly intended by the speaker), and the two kinds of propositional
meanings are mutually constraining. The ultimate interpretation should be one in
which the explicature together with intended contextual assumptions provides an
inferentially sound basis for the implications derived.
In this paper, we look in detail at some of the particular micro-processes in-
volved in the online, relevance-driven derivation of explicature and implicatures.
But before that, we set out some background intellectual history tracing the devel-
opment of the concept of implicature. It did not arise within linguistics or cognitive
science but within the philosophy of language, where its main purpose was to help
in the delineation of a favoured notion of ‘semantic content’. Its subsequent adop-
tion into the cognitively-based relevance-theoretic account of communication
where it is placed in opposition to explicature rather than semantics has naturally
led to its being somewhat altered with regard to the domain of utterance meaning it
encompasses and the role it plays.
2. How it all began: semantic content and implicature
In his ‘logic of conversation’, Paul Grice (1967/89) sought to separate out the sem-
antic content of an uttered sentence, i.e. what it says, from any other thoughts and
ideas that a speaker might mean or communicate by her action of uttering the sen-
tence. His collective term for all those extra or secondary meanings that might be
conveyed was ‘implicature’, where implicatures are intended propositional com-
ponents of the utterance’s overall significance but are not the basis on which the ut-
terance is judged as true or false.
Implicatures can arise in two ways: via presumptions concerning rational com-
municative behaviour or via certain linguistic conventions. The implicature of (5)
is an example of the first sort, a ‘conversational’ implicature, and the implicature of
(6) is an example of the second sort, a ‘conventional’ implicature (see Huang, this
volume, and Moeschler, this volume, for more details):
(5) That material looks red to me.
Implicature: T HERE IS SOME DOUBT ABOUT WHETHER THE MATERIAL IS RED OR
NOT .
(6) Mary is a housewife but she is very intelligent.

Implicature: T HERE IS A CONTRAST OF SOME SORT BETWEEN BEING A HOUSEWIFE
AND BEING VERY INTELLIGENT.

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With (5), the idea is that if the speaker was completely certain of the redness of the
material she should have made the more informative statement that the material is
red; since she did not and since, other things being equal, speakers are expected to
be as informative as they can relevantly be, she must be implicating that there is
some doubt about the redness of the material. Thus this conversational implicature
follows from one of the several conversational maxims that Grice sets out as regu-
lating rational communication (Grice 1975). Note that the proposition in (2) above,
implicated by Amy in her response to Max in (1), is also a conversational implica-
ture, one that would be dependent on Grice’s conversational maxim of relevance.
He drew a further distinction among conversational implicatures between ‘general-
ized’ ones, such as (5), which arise across a great many contexts of use and ‘par-
ticularized’ ones, such as (2), which are dependent on the properties of specific,
often one-off, contexts, in this case the conversation about a particular party.
Whether Grice intended this generalized/particularized distinction to carry any the-
oretical weight is unclear, but, as we will see when we move to the explicature/im-
plicature distinction, it turns out that the status of many of the generalized cases is
quite controversial. With (6), on the other hand, the implicature does not depend on
any conversational presumptions and occurs across all contexts because it is gen-
erated on the basis of the conventional linguistic meaning of the connective but.
In all these cases, the meaning allegedly implicated is separated off from the
primary meaning, that is, the semantic content of the uttered sentence, which is the
propositional content on the basis of which the utterance is judged as true or false.
In the case of (5), this propositional content is that the material in question appears
to the speaker to be red, so if the speaker is, in fact, in no doubt that the material is
red, her utterance is somewhat infelicitous or inappropriate, but she has not spoken
falsely on that basis. In the case of (6), the propositional content is that Mary is a
housewife and she is very intelligent, and, again, if there is, in fact, no contrast be-
tween these two properties, the utterance is not thereby made false, though it is cer-
tainly inappropriate and very misleading.
In Grice’s account, what implicatures of any stripe are set apart from is ‘what is
said’ by a speaker, which Grice took to be the truth-conditional content of the ut-
terance. What is said is determinable from the conventional linguistic meaning of
the sentence uttered together with some minor context-dependent considerations,
specifically, selection of the occasion-specific sense of any ambiguous words or
structures and fixing of referents of indexical elements. The centrality of this sem-
antic ‘what is said’, the proposition expressed by a sentence, goes back some way
in the history of the philosophy of language, to at least Frege, Russell and Carnap.
They were first and foremost logicians, interested in the syntactic and, especially,
the semantic properties of formal languages, such as the predicate calculus. How-
ever, they extrapolated from these artificial languages to human (natural) lan-
guages, which they assumed would be found to have the same fundamental prop-
erties, abstracting away from such imperfections as ambiguity and vagueness. So,

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just as the semantics of logical formulae was taken to be a matter of how the ex-
ternal world must be for them to be true (that is, their truth conditions) and the se-
mantics of logical connectives such as ‘&’, ‘v’, ‘f’ was fully captured by truth
tables, it was assumed that natural language sentences also have truth conditions
and natural language connectives such as and, or, if … then are truth-functional.
The presence within natural languages of such elements as indexicals which de-
pend on a context of use for their ‘semantic value’ was seen as an interesting extra
issue to be dealt with but not a threat to the overall picture. Adherence to truth-con-
ditional semantics and to explicit logical formalism continues today in contempor-
ary formal semantic work on natural languages.
This ‘ideal language’ approach was challenged by Austin, Strawson and the
later Wittgenstein, who developed the ‘ordinary language’ approach, aimed at de-
scribing natural language phenomena rather than forcing them into the logical
mould. They rejected the equation of sentence meaning with truth conditions,
maintaining that although a sentence abstracted from use has a meaning, it is only
in the context of a speech act (an utterance) that it expresses a proposition and so
has truth conditions; it is the statement thus made that has truth conditions, the sen-
tence per se does not. This aspect of ordinary language philosophy is very much re-
flected in the relevance-theoretic framework according to which sentence meaning
is not truth-conditional but provides merely a template or schema which is contex-
tually enriched on an occasion of utterance into a complete proposition, a proposi-
tion which the speaker has explicitly communicated (the explicature of the utter-
ance).
A second aspect of the descriptive investigative work of the ‘ordinary lan-
guage’ philosophers was the close observation of the meaning of words as used in
ordinary communication. This included attention to a range of linguistic ex-
pressions that lay beyond the reach of the truth-conditional paradigm, including
such connectives as but, yet, despite, after all, whereas, moreover, so and anyway,
sentence adverbials like frankly, seriously, evidently, unfortunately, and inciden-
tally, and such discourse elements as alas, indeed, oh, for goodness sake, and well.
Quite a few of these seemed explainable in speech act terms; for instance, but in (6)
above could be characterized as introducing a second-order speech act of contrast-
ing the two first-order speech acts of stating (‘Mary is a housewife’ and ‘Mary is
very intelligent’); seriously could be characterized as modifying the speech act a
speaker is performing, e.g. an act of asserting (‘Seriously, you will regret this’) or
an act of requesting information (‘Seriously, where is my key?’) (for discussion,
see Ifantidou 2001).
This focus on language in use also led to a reappraisal of analyses of words
whose semantics was of central importance within the formal truth-conditional
paradigm. Strawson (1952) pointed out that the natural language counterparts of
logical connectives are often used with much richer (non-truth-functional) mean-
ings than their counterparts in logical languages, such as the temporal and causal

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connotations of many instances of sentences conjoined with and (e.g. She insulted
him and he resigned), the implication often carried by conversational disjunctions
that the speaker’s grounds for uttering a sentence of the form ‘P or Q’ are not that
she knows P to be true or that she knows Q to be true, but that she has some other
(non-truth-functional) basis for her utterance. Close attention to a range of predi-
cates led to strong views on their precise meanings and thus on how they ought to
be used: the word know should not be used about certainties (e.g. I know this is my
hand is a misuse), the word try only applies if there is some difficulty, the phrase
looks to me (as in (5) above) is used only when there is some doubt about the real-
ity, and so on (for discussion, see Travis 1991).
Initially, the two approaches, the truth-theoretic and the use-theoretic, were
seen as diametrically opposed and exclusive: either you analyse natural language
meaning in the logical truth-conditional way or you describe it as it occurs and is
understood in everyday use. One of Grice’s great contributions was to bring the
two traditions together into a complementary rather than rivalrous relation. His
own formative philosophical development lay within the ordinary language camp,
and its emphasis on speaking as an action (rationally-based and with conse-
quences) is evident throughout his work on implicature. However, his saying/im-
plicating distinction and his analyses of particular natural language words, includ-
ing the connectives and quantifiers, are informed by insights from both traditions.
He insisted – against the central tenet of most ordinary language theorists – that it
is important not to equate meaning and use (Grice 1967/89: 4); in other words, he
distinguished semantics and pragmatics. So, in the case of (5) above, someone who
utters it looks red to me when she has absolute certainty about the redness of the
item in question may, in many contexts, be somewhat misleading, saying some-
thing weaker than she could have said, given the state of her knowledge; neverthe-
less, the proposition that comprises the semantic content of her utterance, what she
has said (as opposed to what she merely implicated), namely, that the item in ques-
tion looks red to her, is true. Most important for Grice’s case here is that the impli-
cation of doubt or uncertainty is cancellable: it is possible to conceive of a context
in which what is at issue is people’s perceptions, how things look or sound or feel
to them, in which case the utterances X feels hot to me and Y looks red to me would
not carry any implications of doubt or uncertainty. Thus, those implications, preva-
lent though they may be, are not part of the meaning (the semantics) of those
words, not part of what is said by them; when they do arise they are a product of
speaker-hearer assumptions about normal conversational use.
The explanatory power of an account that combines logico-semantic analysis
with considerations of language use is particularly well-exemplified in Grice’s
treatment of the connectives and and or. Their semantics, he argues, is identical
with that of their logical counterparts, hence truth-functional, and the stronger im-
plications that they seem to have in many contexts can be explained by the ‘logic of
conversation’:

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(7) Amy insulted Max and he resigned.

Propositions meant:
a. A MY INSULTED M AX & M AX RESIGNED
b. M AX RESIGNED AFTER A MY INSULTED HIM
c. M AX RESIGNED BECAUSE A MY INSULTED HIM
(8) Max is working on his lecture or he is watching TV.
Propositions meant:
a. M AX IS WORKING ON HIS LECTURE V M AX IS WATCHING TV
b. M AX IS NOT BOTH WORKING ON HIS LECTURE & WATCHING TV
c. T HE SPEAKER DOESN ’ T KNOW THAT M AX IS WORKING ON HIS LECTURE
d. T HE SPEAKER DOESN ’ T KNOW THAT M AX IS WATCHING TV
In each case, on Grice’s account, the proposition that constitutes the semantics of
the utterance (what is said) is the first one and all the others are conversational im-
plicatures. Various conversational maxims play their part in the (non-demon-
strative) inference process by which these implicatures are derived: the maxim of
orderliness for (7b), probably the maxim of relevance for (7c), the maxim of in-
formativeness for (8b)–(8d).4 One of the great strengths, in Grice’s opinion, of an
account which distinguishes the statement made by an utterance (hence its seman-
tics) from its implicatures is that it allows for the very general patterns of valid in-
ference formulated within the logical semantic tradition to be carried over into the
semantics of natural language (for discussion, see Grice 1975: 41–43).
Thus, in Grice’s conception of ‘what is said’ we see the preservation of a notion
of semantic content much akin to that of Frege and Russell, that is, closely tied to
the context-free semantics of the words in the uttered sentence with only a very
minimal context-dependent component, restricted to choosing between the senses
of ambiguous words and supplying values for indexicals, both apparently achieved
on the basis of best contextual fit (Grice 1975: 44). However, Grice’s ‘what is said’
has another important property that distinguishes it from truth-conditional sentence
meaning. His interest in language in use, in actions performed by speaking, such as
asserting something or implicating something, required that, for him, ‘what is said’
by an utterance must be a component of speaker meaning (also referred to as mean-
ing-intended, or m-intended, content), that is, it is overtly endorsed by the speaker.5
Hence what is said and what is implicated together constitute what the speaker
meant by her utterance (for discussion, see Neale 1992; Recanati 2004: chapter 1).
3. From ‘what is said’ to explicature
The two-fold nature of Grice’s ‘what is said’ is reflected in the fact that Griceans
sometimes talk of what the speaker says and sometimes of what the utterance or the
words themselves say. Unfortunately, this very combination of features – speaker

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meantness and a minimalist, albeit truth-conditional, semantics – in a single notion

leads to a problem. It seems that quite often what a speaker says and means is
something more specific than that which results from the minimal identification
processes that Grice allowed for in arriving at what is said. Consider (9):
(9) It’s snowing.
What sentence semantics (linguistic conventions, in Grice’s terms) plus values for
indexical elements delivers is, at most, the proposition that, say, IT IS SNOWING AT
MIDDAY ON 31 M ARCH 2010. But is this the proposition that the speaker asserts
(explicitly communicates)? Consider an utterance of (9) as a response to an en-
quiry about why the speaker, who is in London, has abandoned plans to go for a run
in the local park. It does not seem that the speaker intends to ‘say’/assert/express
the proposition that it is snowing tout court (that is, just anywhere): If it is snowing
in Oslo, that fact would not make this particular utterance of (9) true. What makes
it true is that it is snowing in London, which suggests that a specific location-of-
snowing constituent, despite apparently not being the value of anything in the lin-
guistic form, is part of what is said, rather than being merely implicated.
Here is another example, well-known in the literature (see Bach 1994), which
illustrates the same problem:
(10) Mother (to child crying over a cut on his knee): You’re not going to die.
a. Y OU (B ILLY ) ARE NOT GOING TO DIE FROM THAT CUT
b. Y OU (B ILLY ) SHOULD STOP MAKING SUCH A FUSS ABOUT IT
What the mother means (what she intends to communicate to the child) is given in
(a) and (b), where (b) is clearly an implicature and (a) seems to be what she has said
(explicitly communicated). But the proposition delivered by conventional lin-
guistic meaning and the assignment of a referent to the pronoun you (hence the
Gricean ‘what is said’) is B ILLY IS NOT GOING TO DIE , which seems to entail that
Billy is immortal, something that the mother has no intention of conveying.
What these examples indicate is that it is just not generally right that what a
speaker says (and means) is as close to the semantics of the sentence uttered as
Grice’s definition of ‘what is said’ requires (Grice 1975: 44). In other words, it is
not the case that a single level of meaning can do double duty as both sentence se-
mantics and speaker-meant primary meaning (explicitly communicated content).
Faced with this dilemma, there are essentially three moves that different theorists
have made. The first is to maintain the traditional minimal truth-conditional se-
mantics and drop the requirement that it be speaker-meant (communicated); the
second is to make the opposite move, that is, maintain a level of meant/communi-
cated content that is distinct from merely implicated content and accept that this
may require much more elaboration of the linguistic meaning than Grice allowed;
the third is to separate the two Gricean requirements on ‘what is said’ and have
both a truth-conditional semantic content (which is not a part of speaker meaning)

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and a fully pragmatic (speaker-meant) notion of ‘what is said’. For discussion of

these options and their takers, see Carston (2004a) and Recanati (2004: chapters 2
and 4). The relevance-theoretic approach that we support takes the second option:
we see the explicit-implicit distinction as a communicative distinction – a distinc-
tion between two types of communicated assumptions or thoughts6. As our dis-
cussion of examples (1), (9) and (10) indicates, the explicitly communicated con-
tent may go well beyond Grice’s what is said.
Before looking at the kinds of pragmatic processes that can contribute to the
content of an explicature we need to say something about our view of linguistic
meaning or sentence semantics. The label ‘semantic minimalism’ has been appro-
priated by philosophers who take a resolutely truth-conditional stance on sentence
meaning (Borg 2004; Cappelen and Lepore 2005), but, in fact, our relevance-the-
oretic view of the linguistic semantics on which pragmatics builds in constructing
an explicature is even more minimalist. The view is that, typically, context-free
sentence meaning is subpropositional (does not determine a fully truth-conditional
content) and provides a schema or set of clues that constrains the occasion-specific
pragmatic process of determining the proposition the speaker explicitly communi-
cated. This view marks a strong shift away from the traditional ideal language phil-
osophy of Frege and Russell to a much more cognitive, empirically-informed posi-
tion. The cognitive turn in linguistics spearheaded by Chomsky (1980, 2000),
experimental work on language processing (Swinney 1979; Altmann and Steed-
man 1988, among hundreds of others), and hypotheses about cognitive architecture
emerging from both philosophy of mind (Fodor 1983, 1987) and evolutionary psy-
chology (Cosmides and Tooby 1994; Sperber 1994, 2002) have converged on a
view of the mind as consisting, in large part, of modular systems each dedicated to
dealing with a particular problem that human minds confront. These include an
array of perceptual modules, systems for spatial reasoning, a language faculty
(dedicated to decoding linguistic forms), and a cluster of systems dedicated to so-
cial cognition, including a mental state interpreter (a system or systems that at-
tribute intentions, beliefs, motives, etc. to others) and, perhaps as a submodule of
this, a system that interprets ostensive stimuli, that is, a pragmatics module, which
recovers the content of speakers’ communicative intentions. Within this cognitive
landscape, sentences (linguistic entities) and acts of ostensive communication
(whether verbal or non-verbal) fall in the domain of distinct, albeit interfacing, sys-
tems. The language faculty operates in accordance with its own parsing pro-
cedures, which are encapsulated from general world knowledge, and delivers a
logical form, that is, a non-propositional conceptual representation, generated en-
tirely from the context-free meaning of lexical items and the syntax of the sentence
uttered. This is a vital input to the pragmatic processor, which uses it, together with
a circumscribed set of contextual assumptions, to construct the explicatures and
implicatures of the utterance. For further discussion, see Sperber and Wilson
(2002) and Wilson and Sperber (2004).

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The emphasis in cognitive science is on the nature of the faculties of the human
mind/brain that house our linguistic and interpretive abilities and on the mechan-
isms that do the work of comprehension, a quite distinct set of concerns from those
of the anti-psychological ‘ideal language’ philosophers. However, alongside these
trends in cognitively-based research, there have been some roughly parallel devel-
opments in the philosophy of language. Kaplan’s (1977/89) distinction between
the character and content of linguistic expressions parallels the cognitivist distinc-
tion between context-invariant, encoded (or standing) linguistic meaning and the
content inferred in specific contexts.7 And the ‘contextualist’ semantics stance,
that word meanings quite generally (not just indexicals) are highly context-sensi-
tive (Searle 1978; Travis 1985; Recanati 1993, 2004) and so may make different
contributions to truth-conditional content on different occasions of their use, is
very much at one with the relevance-theoretic view on explicitly communicated ut-
terance content, as will be evident in the next section.
4. The pragmatics of explicature
On the cognitive pragmatic approach that we endorse, the explicit content of an ut-
terance (its explicature) is taken to be that content which ordinary speaker-hearer
intuitions would identify as having been said or asserted by the speaker. In section
5, we discuss the role of intuitions as a criterion for drawing the distinction be-
tween explicature and implicature. In this section, we look at a range of examples
which, together with (1), (9) and (10) above, indicate the extent and kinds of con-
tributions that pragmatics may make to the explicature of an utterance. Clearly, dis-
ambiguation and the assignment of context-specific values to indexicals and de-
monstratives are essential pragmatic processes in ascertaining the explicitly
communicated content. On this, we agree with Grice and virtually everybody who
has discussed the proposition explicitly expressed or communicated by a speaker.
So, in the following subsections, we focus on pragmatic contributions to explica-
ture which go well beyond the effects of those two obvious processes.
4.1. Linguistically unarticulated constituents of content

In the following examples, the sentence uttered is given in (a) and a likely expli-
cature of the utterance (dependent on context, of course) is given in (b):
(11) a. No-one goes there anymore.
b. H ARDLY ANYONE OF ANY WORTH / TASTE GOES TO LOCATION X ANY MORE
(12) a. There’s milk in the fridge.

b. T HERE ’ S MILK OF SUFFICIENT QUANTITY / QUALITY FOR ADDING TO COFFEE
IN THE FRIDGE Y

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(13) a. Max: Would you like to stay for supper.

Amy: No thanks, I’ve already eaten.
b. A MY HAS ALREADY EATEN SUPPER THIS EVENING
Intuitively, the speaker of (11a) does not assert that no-one (that is, not a single
person in existence) goes to the place in question, which is what seems to be pre-
dicted by a strictly Gricean account; rather, she is directly communicating that
very few people of a particular sort (important, fashionable, etc.) go to the place in
question these days. This is the content with which other people may express
agreement or disagreement, on which the truth or falsity of the utterance would be
judged, and which would ground a possible implicature that the speaker doesn’t
want to go there. In the case of (12), the presence of just a few stale drips of milk
on the bottom shelf of the fridge would be compatible with the conventional/en-
coded linguistic meaning of the utterance, but in a context in which the partici-
pants are intent on having a cup of coffee a more specific enriched conception of
‘milk in the fridge’ is inferred and contributes to the proposition explicitly com-
municated.
These examples, like several of the earlier ones (see (1), (9) and (10) above),
suggest that there are explicatures which include constituents of content that do not
appear to be the value of any element in the linguistic form of the utterance; for in-
stance, the causal component in (1), the location in (9), the object of eating in (13).
Such constituents have been the subject of extensive debate in recent years, con-
cerning their source and the processes that are responsible for their recovery. One
way of accounting for these elements is to assume that there is a lot more linguistic
structure in the utterances than meets the eye (or ear). The proposed structure takes
the form of covert indexicals attached to the relevant (overt) linguistic items, or
parameters in the lexical semantics of the linguistic expression, requiring a particu-
lar type of value to be assigned. For example, the domain restriction on the quanti-
fier in (11) (and perhaps (12)) would arise as the result of saturating an indexical
that is encoded in the noun phrase,8 while the location constituent in (9) would be
the value assigned to a location variable encoded with meteorological verbs or to
an event variable that accompanies predicates quite generally.
According to our cognitive pragmatic stance, it is quite possible that these el-
ements of content are supplied by a process of ‘free’ pragmatic enrichment. Such a
process is wholly pragmatic in that, not only is the specific content recovered prag-
matically, but the motivation for its recovery is entirely pragmatic, that is, it is
driven by the search for an interpretation that is consistent with the presumption of
optimal relevance. If this is right, then there are cases of genuinely ‘unarticulated
constituents’, that is, constituents of explicature content that are not just unpro-
nounced but are not present at any level of linguistic representation, where, by ‘lin-
guistic’, we are referring to the processes or representations of the language fac-
ulty, free from any pragmatic influence.

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There is a vigorous ongoing discussion about whether it is extensive covert lin-

guistic structure (plus pragmatic saturation) or a process of free pragmatic enrich-
ment that is responsible for the recovery of these non-phonologically-realized con-
stituents of content. Both sides of the debate have developed various criteria and
tests for deciding in particular instances whether the content is linguistically man-
dated or pragmatically motivated. We cannot review this extensive literature here,
but it seems clear that the decision will have to be made on a case by case basis. As
things stand, it looks as if some cases will be best explained in terms of covert lin-
guistic structure (the domain restriction on quantifiers, for instance), while in other
cases there is just no linguistic evidence for a covert linguistic element underpin-
ning the content in question (for instance, the causal component in the explicature
of certain cases of and-conjunction, such as example (1)). For strong represen-
tatives of the covert linguistic structure view, see Stanley (2000, 2002), King and
Stanley (2005) and Martí (2006); for the opposing pragmatic view, see Carston
(2000), Recanati (2002), Wilson and Sperber (2002), Hall (2008a, 2008b).
A case that has received considerable attention is the location constituent in ut-
terances about the weather (or other atmospheric conditions), such as (9), repeated
here:
(9) It’s snowing.
It seems at first blush that this is a good candidate for the presence in linguistic
logical form of a covert location indexical which has to be given a value in context.
Its apparent obligatoriness makes it like cases of overt indexicals that have to be
pragmatically saturated in context:
(14) She put it there.
Arguably, for a full understanding of what a speaker of this sentence has explicitly
communicated, a hearer needs to be able to supply a value for all the overt indexi-
cal elements: she, it and there. If he can’t do this, if, for instance, the proposition
that he derives is that a particular individual, Mary, put something on a particular
table, he won’t have recovered the proposition expressed; he needs to find the in-
tended referent of it. However, several authors (e.g. Recanati 2002, 2007a; Cap-
pelen and Hawthorne 2007) have argued that the provision of a location with
weather verbs is optional. For instance, it doesn’t seem to be required in the fol-
lowing cases:
(15) Once, in the middle ages, it rained constantly for 100 years.
(16) Why does it rain? It rains because water vapour in the air condenses and […]
While it is true that the majority of uses of weather predicates are understood as
communicating a location, (15) and (16) demonstrate that this is not mandatory. It
is, then, highly unlikely that the logical form of weather predicates contains a
covert indexical demanding saturation on every occasion of utterance.9 That the lo-

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cation is so frequently communicated is because the relevance of an episode of

snowing or raining most often turns on its location: the motivation for the hearer to
infer it comes not from the linguistic system, but from the fact that the implications
he is most likely to draw from weather information concern its effects on the par-
ticular place and its inhabitants.10
Furthermore, there is a range of other cases where a communicated element
which is part of the explicature (the intuitive truth-conditional content) of the ut-
terance cannot be accounted for by positing some element of hidden linguistic
structure. This includes cases of deferred reference or metonymy, such as (17a),
where the definite description is taken to refer to the customer who ordered the ham
sandwich, and (17b), where the predicate parked out back cannot literally apply to
the subject I, and referential uses of definite descriptions quite generally, as in
(17c), which expresses a singular (non-descriptive) proposition: a IS OUR NEW EDI-
TOR . There are also a lot of cases where the minimal (unintuitive) proposition, de-
rivable on the basis of the encoded linguistic content and reference assignment
alone, is either trivially true or patently false, as in (17d) and (17e):
(17) a. The ham sandwich wants his bill.
b. I’m parked out back.
c. The woman standing in the doorway is our new editor.
d. That guy has a brain.
e. She isn’t a human being.
So even if some phenomena, such as quantifier domain restriction, turn out to be
better analyzed as involving saturation of hidden indexicals, examples such as
these strongly suggest that, in the end, free pragmatic enrichment cannot be en-
tirely avoided and everyone who recognizes this speaker-meant level of explicit
content will need an account of it.
Nevertheless, those of us who advocate free pragmatic enrichment still have
some work to do to shore up our position against criticism from the hidden indexi-
calists. The key objection, made most explicitly by Stanley (2002), is that the pro-
cess of free enrichment is not sufficiently constrained, allowing for enrichments
that clearly do not occur. Two examples of the kind of overgeneration he presents
are given in (18) and (19). According to the pragmaticist, an utterance of the sen-
tence in (18a) could communicate the explicature in (18b) in an appropriate con-
text, the quantifier domain having been supplied by a process of free pragmatic en-
richment. Stanley’s question, then, is what prevents that same pragmatic process
from supplying the constituent [OR D UTCHMAN ] so that the utterance is predicted
(wrongly) to communicate the proposition in (18c) in a context in which it would
be relevant. Similarly, free enrichment should enable, he says, an utterance of the
sentence in (19a), in a context in which it is common ground that John likes his
mother, to communicate the explicature in (19b), which, however, it clearly does
not:

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(18) a. Every Frenchman is seated.

b. E VERY F RENCHMAN IN THE CLASS IS SEATED
c. E VERY F RENCHMAN OR D UTCHMAN IN THE CLASS IS SEATED
(19) a. John likes Sally.

b. J OHN I LIKES S ALLY AND HIS I MOTHER
This overgeneration objection is potentially serious and it has been addressed in

some detail by Hall (2008a, 2008b, 2009), who sets out to show that a relevance-
theoretic account of free pragmatic enrichment would not make the alleged predic-
tions. We cannot review the arguments here (though the distinction we make in
section 5.2. between local and global processes is relevant to the issue), but what
emerges clearly from Hall’s discussion is that when proper attention is given to the
nature of the principles and processes at work in pragmatics, ‘free’ enrichment is in
fact quite tightly constrained.
4.2. Pragmatic adjustment of word meaning

The controversy about the existence of a pragmatic process of free enrichment has
focussed mainly on unarticulated constituents – cases where there is a component
of the explicature which is not the value of any element of the linguistic form.
However, it has been claimed that there is another pragmatic process contributing
to explicature that is not linguistically mandated and therefore can also be con-
sidered a kind of free enrichment. This is the process of adjusting or ‘modulating’
lexically encoded meanings, so that the concept understood as communicated by
the use of a word differs from the concept encoded – it may be narrower or looser,
or some combination of the two. Consider some examples:
(20) To buy a house in London you need money.
(21) Max: Would you like to go to a club tonight?
Amy: I’m tired. Let’s go to a movie.
(22) I’ll put the empty bottles in the garbage.
(23) The water is boiling.
Grasping the proposition explicitly communicated by these examples is very likely
to involve an optional process of meaning modulation (of the concept encoded by
the underlined word in each case). In most contexts, the proposition that buying
something requires (some/any amount of) money will be trivial and uninformative,
so the lexically encoded concept MONEY is likely to be narrowed to a concept, rep-
resented as MONEY *, that denotes just those quantities that would count as suffi-
ciently large amounts of money in the context of house-buying. Similar comments
apply to Amy’s response in (21); the concept she communicates with the word tired

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is more specific than the very general encoded concept TIRED , which includes states
of exhaustion which would preclude doing anything other than lying down to sleep.
The examples in (22) and (23) appear to require a different sort of adjustment: im-
agine (22) uttered in a context where people are clearing up the morning after a
party, so that many of the bottles to be put in the garbage may contain the dregs of
wine or beer and various other items of debris, so are not strictly and literally empty.
Here the communicated concept EMPTY * has a broader denotation than the encoded
concept EMPTY. A similar point can be made about (23), which might be used to
communicate any of a range of broader concepts than the encoded one: it might be a
rough approximation (the water is near enough to boiling for the difference not to
matter for current purposes) or a hyperbolic use as when someone utters it upon
stepping into bath water that is a bit too hot for an entirely comfortable immersion.
The general consensus is that these meaning modulations affect the explica-
ture, that is, the proposition that the speaker communicates directly and that
grounds any implicatures of the utterance. If this were not the case – if these prag-
matically derived concepts were themselves registered only at the level of impli-
cature – then we would expect that many of them, particularly the examples invol-
ving concept broadening, would be judged false. Yet, intuitively, this is not the
case: someone who, in the context described just above, includes in the denotation
of empty bottles, some that contain a few millilitres of flat beer, would not be
judged to have spoken falsely and only implicated that the bottle is near enough to
being empty that it can be thrown out. Recently, it has been argued by both rel-
evance theorists and some philosophers of language that many instances of meta-
phorically used words can be explained in the same way, that is, as cases whose
comprehension is achieved by an adjustment of the literal encoded concept, result-
ing in a radical broadening of denotation with often some degree of narrowing as
well (Bezuidenhout 2001; Carston 2002; Wilson and Carston 2006, 2007).
Attempts to give an account of these lexical modulation processes are recent
and have raised many issues that remain to be investigated in detail (see the dis-
cussion in Carston 2010). One interesting question is the nature of the input to the
process – that is, the nature of word meanings themselves. In the discussion so far,
we have gone along with the view that most open-class words (nouns, verbs, ad-
jectives) encode concepts, but the idea that words might not encode full-fledged
concepts but something more like constraints, instructions for building concepts,
or rules for use, has been gaining popularity recently (for discussion, see Carston
2002: chapter 5.4.; Pietroski 2005; Recanati 2004: chapter 9; Bosch 2007). What
motivates this view is chiefly the observation that understanding the intended
meaning of a word quite typically requires some degree of modulation of its en-
coded meaning. In many cases, words appear to encode something too abstract to
serve as a constituent of a thought, hence of a communicated proposition (see the
discussion in Searle (1983) of the verbs open and cut, and in Carston (2002) of ad-
jectives like happy). Given the ubiquity of modulation, an appealing view is that

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word meanings are far more schematic and abstract than full-fledged concepts,
and, therefore, on every occasion of understanding a word a pragmatic process of
concept retrieval or construction is required. Of course, if this view of the nature of
word meaning is correct, then modulation would not be a ‘free’ pragmatic process
because the underspecified lexical encoding would make the process obligatory.
Another development enabled by the recognition of lexical pragmatic adjust-
ment as an important contributor to explicature is the reanalysis of several of the
cases previously taken to be instances of unarticulated constituents. For example,
cases such as (17d), which might previously have been analysed as expressing
T HAT GUY HAS A BRILLIANT BRAIN , or (20) as Y OU NEED A LOT OF MONEY, have
been recast as cases of modulation of the lexical concepts BRAIN and MONEY. This
raises the question of how many more of them it is possible to reanalyze in this
way, and thus, whether there will turn out to be any truly ‘free’ (hence optional)
pragmatic processes at the level of explicature at all. If all cases previously thought
of as unarticulated constituents could be reanalyzed as cases of lexical concept ad-
justment, this would enable an isomorphic structural relationship between lin-
guistic logical form and explicature to be maintained. Such an outcome should find
favour with the semanticists mentioned above (Stanley, Martí) who are concerned
about the violation of semantic compositionality that the existence of unarticulated
constituents would entail (see note 10). At the same time, though, such a move
would seem to result in pragmatic inference being even more pervasive in deter-
mining explicit content, since it makes what Carston (2010) calls ‘pragmatic sus-
ceptibility’ (to distinguish it from the linguistically indicated context-sensitivity of
indexicals) a property of virtually every expression in the language. However,
while this is in many ways an appealing way to go, there are some cases for which
it does not look plausible. Consider again the case of weather predicates, discussed
earlier, where a particular utterance of (24a) has the explicature in (24b):
(24) a. It’s snowing.
b. I T ’ S SNOWING IN L ONDON AT TIME t
It is at least very counter-intuitive (and no-one has tried to argue for it) that SNOW-
ING - IN - LONDON is a single concept that results from pragmatic modulation (nar-
rowing) of the lexical concept SNOWING . Similar remarks apply to the explicature
of certain and-conjunction utterances, such as the cause-consequence interpre-
tation in (1). So it seems that some cases are likely to remain best analyzed as in-
stances of unarticulated constituents.
4.3. Reconstrual of some cases of Gricean implicature

What should be clear from the discussion in the two preceding subsections is that
explicatures can contain a great deal more pragmatically inferred material than
Grice allowed for in his ‘what is said’; as well as processes of disambiguation and

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indexical saturation, there is a range of pragmatic processes that enrich or other-

wise modify linguistically encoded content in the course of recovering the prop-
osition understood to have been explicitly communicated.11 As we will discuss in
more detail in the next section, this view of explicit utterance content has impli-
cations for some of Grice’s key cases of conversational implicature. Consider the
following:
(25) a. I’ve read some of Deirdre Wilson’s papers.
b. I HAVEN ’ T READ ALL OF D EIRDRE W ILSON ’ S PAPERS
(26) a. Hannah reported Joe for misconduct and he was fired.

b. J OE WAS FIRED AS A RESULT OF H ANNAH REPORTING HIM FOR MISCONDUCT
In many contexts, an utterance of (25a) will communicate the proposition in (25b),

and, in many contexts, an utterance of (26a) will communicate (26b). Neither of
these appears to be the result of a linguistically mandated process of variable satu-
ration and Grice treated them as cases of conversational implicature. Note that both
fall into his category of ‘generalized’ implicatures: although they are not inevitable
and can be cancelled without contradiction (e.g. I’ve read some of Deirdre Wilson’s
papers – in fact, I’ve read all of them is a consistent utterance), they would occur
across the majority of contexts of utterance. This is reflected in the fact that we can
present the sentences uttered in (25a) and (26a) without indicating any previous
discourse or other contextual specifics and assume readers will agree that the prop-
ositions in (25b) and (26b) are likely to be inferred in each case. This distinguishes
them from particularized implicatures, as in (1), (2) and others to be seen shortly.
Once it is recognized that there is far more linguistic underdeterminacy of con-
tent than was envisaged by Grice, the status of these elements of meaning becomes
much less clear, since it is quite possible that they are in fact constituents of expli-
cature. The price we pay, then, for such a pragmatic conception of explicit utter-
ance content is that it is no longer always a straightforward matter to distinguish
which elements of speaker meaning are implicatures and which belong to explica-
ture. In the next section, we consider some of the various tests and criteria that have
been proposed for drawing the explicit-implicit distinction.
5. Explicature/implicature – How to draw the distinction
5.1. Intuitions and tests

Explicatures and implicatures are characterized as follows within relevance the-
ory:
An assumption communicated by an utterance U is explicit (hence is an explicature) if
and only if it is a development of a logical form12 encoded by U, where explicitness is a
matter of degree: the greater the contribution of encoded meaning the more explicit the

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explicature is and the greater the contribution of pragmatically inferred content the less
explicit it is. Any assumption communicated, but not explicitly so, is implicitly com-
municated: it is an implicature. (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995: 182)
These definitions are fine as far as they go, but they do not provide us with a clear
criterion for deciding, in any particular case of pragmatically derived meaning,
whether it constitutes a distinct implicitly communicated proposition (an implica-
ture) or a pragmatic contribution to explicature. For instance, how can we tell
whether the ‘not all’ meaning in (25) above and the inferred cause-consequence re-
lation in (26) are developments of the logical form of the sentence uttered or are
distinct implicated propositions?
Like relevance theorists, Recanati (1989, 1993, 2004) is a long-term advocate
of a pragmatically enriched level of communicated content, which he often refers
to as the ‘intuitive (or enriched) what is said’ or the ‘intuitive truth-conditional con-
tent’ of the utterance, distinguishing it from Grice’s minimalist semantic notion.
He has, in fact, elevated the status of native speaker intuitions about this to the
level of a criterion for distinguishing explicature (enriched what is said) from im-
plicature: “Availability Principle: In deciding whether a pragmatically determined
aspect of utterance meaning is part of what is said, that is, in making a decision
concerning what is said, we should always try to preserve our pre-theoretic intu-
itions on the matter” (Recanati 1989: 309–10; 1993: 248). The principle yields
clear results for many cases of particularized implicatures, such as Amy’s indirect
answer given in (2) above, for which there is a consensus of intuitions that it falls
outside what is said. But since there are no conflicting predictions among different
theories for cases like this, the criterion isn’t really doing any work here. Consider
a slightly more contentious case:
(27) a. Robert broke a finger last night.

b. R OBERT BROKE A FINGER , EITHER HIS OWN OR SOMEONE ELSE ’ S , ON NIGHT n.
c. R OBERT BROKE HIS OWN FINGER ON NIGHT n.
d. R OBERT CAN ’ T PLAY IN THE MATCH TODAY.
(Carston 2002: 167)
On a Gricean account, what is said by an utterance of (27a) would be as given

(roughly) in (27b). But (27b) is not available to the conscious awareness of the
speaker and hearer, so the Availability Principle denies that it is what is said. Intu-
itively, the inference that the finger broken was Robert’s – which Grice treated as a
generalized conversational implicature – is part of what is ‘said’, or explicitly com-
municated, and is what provides the basis for the hearer’s inference to the (particu-
larized) implicature in (27d).
In this case, there is strong consensus that (27c), rather than (27b), is what was
said or explicitly communicated. But there are many cases where intuitions are less
consistent:

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(28) a. Some lecturers are insecure.

b. The ham sandwich left without paying.
c. When Joe saw Hanna approaching he crossed the street.
d. The man over there drinking champagne is a famous philosopher.
Arguably, a pragmatic component of content contributes to the explicature in each

of these cases: ‘NOT ALL LECTURERS ’ in (28a), ‘THE PERSON WHO ORDERED THE HAM
SANDWICH ’ in (28b), a cause-consequence relation in (28c), an individual concept
denoting a particular person (say, John Perry) in (28d). But, in all these cases, a
more minimal content, closer to the linguistically encoded meaning, is for many
people ‘available’ to intuitions. Although, as most theorists agree, converging in-
tuitions are an important source of data, in many cases we do not have consistent
intuitions that are directly about ‘what is said’ or explicit content, so we need to get
at them more indirectly.
We said above that the explicature is taken to be the ‘intuitive truth-conditional
content’ of the utterance – that is, that content on the basis of which ordinary
speaker-hearers would judge the utterance true or false. The rationale for this
seems to be that the speaker has more responsibility for her explicatures than her
implicatures: an explicature is based on decoded meaning, which is algorithmi-
cally derived, whereas implicatures are entirely inferred, so are more the hearer’s
responsibility. If, as seems to be the case, our judgments about the utterance (true/
false; agree/disagree) and our behavioural responses to it are focused on this level
of content, as opposed to the more minimal what is said, then there is good reason
to believe that the explicature, rather than the Gricean what is said, is a psychologi-
cally real level of representation. In accordance with this, Recanati (2004: 14) as-
sumes that “whoever fully understands a declarative utterance knows which state
of affairs would possibly constitute a truth-maker for that utterance, that is, knows
in what sort of circumstance it would be true”. He therefore suggests that the way
to elicit intuitions concerning the truth-conditional content is “to present subjects
with scenarios describing situations, or, even better, with – possibly animated –
pictures of situations, and to ask them to evaluate the target utterance as true or
false with respect to the situations in question” (2004: 15).
This method of eliciting intuitions has been employed by Ira Noveck and col-
leagues in a series of experiments to test people’s understanding of scalar terms
such as some and or (for a summary of findings, see Noveck 2004; Noveck and
Sperber 2007). As mentioned above, these terms often give rise to scalar pragmatic
inferences: from some of the F, hearers often infer NOT ALL OF THE F; from P or Q,
hearers often infer NOT BOTH P & Q. In an experiment requiring participants to
evaluate the truth/falsity of scalar utterances in particular scenarios, one of the test
utterances was Some of the turtles are in the boxes and it was presented together
with one of several possible accompanying scenarios. For instance, in one case
some of the turtles were in the boxes and some were lying outside the boxes, and in

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another one, the crucial case, all of the turtles were in the boxes. Presented with an
utterance-scenario pair, adult subjects were asked to judge the utterance as ‘true’ or
‘false’ in the scenario, where the response ‘false’ in the test case (where all the
turtles were in the boxes) should, according to Recanati’s principle, indicate that
the scalar inference (NOT ALL OF THE TURTLES ) is contributing to truth-conditional
content (‘what is said’). The problem for the Availability Principle is that adult re-
sponses were very far from univocal. In this particular experiment, 53 % gave the
response ‘true’, 47 % ‘false’ (Noveck 2004: 308) and this result is consistent with
findings across a wide number of other experiments carried out on such scalar
terms. In short, the pre-theoretic intuitions of ordinary speaker-hearers concerning
the truth-conditional content (hence ‘what is said’) of utterances involving scalar
terms (presented with scenarios which strongly encourage the pragmatic infer-
ence) are highly divergent.
The same inconsistency arises for a number of other contentious cases, includ-
ing metonymies (such as (28b) above), metaphorical uses (e.g. My lawyer is a
shark), and some of the quantifier cases (e.g. when the TV guide lists continuous
gardening and antiques programmes and the speaker reports There’s nothing on TV
tonight, a lot of people judge the utterance as (strictly) false). Another well-known
example is the case of misuses of definite descriptions, as discussed by Donnellan
(1966). Consider again (28d) above and suppose that as a matter of fact the man in
question is not drinking champagne (say, he has sparkling water in a champagne
flute), but he is indeed a famous philosopher. Is the utterance of (28d) true or false?
Unfortunately, the full range of possible responses has been attested (‘true’, ‘false’,
‘neither’, and, remarkably, ‘both’).
Should we, then, abandon the idea that there is a propositional content that can
be considered ‘the’ intuitive truth-conditional content of the utterance (which is
stable across different interpreters)? The difficulties with this method of eliciting
truth conditions do not force us to that conclusion, since such tests can be argued to
be not eliciting intuitions about the right thing. What we want is the proposition
that speaker-hearers intuitively take to be explicitly expressed, but what Recanati’s
method taps seems to be something slightly different because it introduces an el-
ement of reflection which makes salient various possible truth-conditional con-
tents, including some of a more strictly literal nature than the intended explicature.
A better guide than such judgments of truth and falsity may be hearers’ responses
to utterances in online comprehension. Consider B’s responses in (29) – (32):
(29) A: It’ll take time for that cut to heal.
B: No it won’t; I’m having the stitches out tomorrow.
(30) A: John double-parked and Mary ran into him.
B: No, Mary ran into him and that’s why he stopped where he did.

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(31) A: Bob’s a bit of a bulldozer.

B: God, yes, he completely ignored the majority opinion on the council.
(32) A: No one goes to that club any more.

B: I know: there were only first-year students there last Saturday.
Clearly, what B is agreeing or disagreeing with here is not any ‘minimal’ proposi-
tion of A’s utterances corresponding to the Gricean ‘what is said’. Rather, in each
case the proposition responded to includes some element that is pragmatically in-
ferred: A FAIRLY LONG TIME in (29); a cause-consequence connection in (30); the
metaphorical meaning in (31), and the domain, something like NO ONE IN OUR
GROUP OF FRIENDS , in (32).13
It seems clear that we would not want to abandon the Availability Principle (we
do want to preserve pre-theoretic intuitions regarding what a speaker says/impli-
cates as much as we can). The problem is that applying the principle (eliciting the
desired intuitions) in contentious cases is quite difficult. One way of sharpening in-
tuitions involves embedding the utterance/sentence at issue in the scope of an op-
erator such as negation, disjunction, the conditional, or the comparative. Consider
the following cases of and-conjunction:
(33) a. The old king has died of a heart attack and a republic has been declared.
b. A republic has been declared and the old king has died of a heart attack.
Recall that Grice held that the meaning of and is simply the truth-functional logical
conjunction ‘&’ and, given his minimalist view of what is said (which is the sem-
antic content of the utterance), it follows that, for him, what is said by utterances of
(33a) and (33b) is the same (they have identical truth-conditional content). Any
difference in what they communicate, specifically in their temporal sequence and
cause-consequence relations, is a matter of conversational implicatures, based on
Grice’s maxims of orderliness and of relevance. As Cohen (1971) first pointed out,
a problem emerges when these conjunctions are embedded in the antecedent of a
conditional, as in (34):
(34) a. If the old king has died of a heart attack and a republic has been declared
then Tom will happy.
b. If a republic has been declared and the old king has died of a heart attack,
then Tom will be unhappy.
The Gricean account predicts that the antecedents of the two conditionals must be
truth-conditionally equivalent and, assuming the truth of this single antecedent
proposition, it must be that one or other of the conditionals is false (Tom can’t be
both happy and unhappy). However, the intuitive consensus is that these could both
be true and that this is because the antecedents differ in the temporal-consequential
relations they express about the two events. It follows that these non-truth-func-

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tional aspects of the conjunctions contribute to the explicatures of the conjunctive

utterances in (33).
This ‘scope test’, as it became known, can be used to demonstrate that other
pragmatically inferred constituents are components of the explicature rather than
distinct implicated propositions:
(35) a. If it rains tomorrow, we’ll stay at home.
b. Sam doesn’t care if some of his students fail, but if they all do, he’ll be
worried.
c. We don’t have any milk; there are just a few rancid drops on the tray.
In (35a), it’s clear that the basis for staying home is rain falling in the specific lo-
cation of the speaker; in (35b), Sam won’t be upset if just some (not all) of his stu-
dents fail;14 in (35c), where the test employs a negation operator rather than a con-
ditional, we understand that the milk that is lacking is of the sort that would be
usable for a specific purpose (such as drinking with coffee).
This embedding procedure played an important role in the early days of rel-
evance theory as a source of evidence indicating that certain pragmatic elements of
meaning, which Grice had taken to be implicatures, can contribute to explicature
instead (see, for instance, Carston 1988). So it was a useful tool for establishing the
extensive role of pragmatic inference in determining explicature, in particular, the
role of processes of free pragmatic enrichment.15 However, it cannot predict or de-
cide in advance whether some such element does contribute to explicature or not
on any particular occasion of utterance. Since the provision of these elements is op-
tional, one has to look at the utterance token – and particularly the occasion-spe-
cific context in which it was tokened – in order to decide whether there is enrich-
ment of content or not. As the embedding procedure essentially tests utterance
types, it does not necessarily allow one to draw the explicit-implicit distinction for
any particular occurrence.16 Given the existence of free (optional) pragmatic en-
richment, the line between explicature and implicature can vary from occasion to
occasion of utterance of the same sentence type, and will be determined by how the
utterance is processed.
5.2. Relevance-based derivation of explicatures and implicatures:

local versus global processes
Let us consider now how the pragmatic system, as envisaged on the relevance-the-
oretic account, derives explicatures and implicatures. The claim is that they are de-
rived in parallel by a unitary, online inferential process, which takes the decoded
linguistic meaning and accessible contextual assumptions as evidence for the in-
terpretation, which must ultimately be both inferentially sound and consistent with
the presumption of optimal relevance. As most theorists (across different ap-
proaches) would agree, a hearer does not first decode the entire utterance, then

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saturate, disambiguate, enrich, and modulate the decoded meaning in order to ar-
rive at the explicature (what is said), and only then use the explicature, together
with contextual assumptions, to form hypotheses about implicatures. Instead, the
explicatures, implicatures, and contextual assumptions are mutually adjusted in
parallel until they form an inferentially sound relation, with premises (explicature,
contextual assumptions) warranting conclusions (implicatures). It follows that a
hypothesis about an implicature can both precede and shape a hypothesis about an
explicature.
Here is a brief example involving the adjustment of explicit content in response
to hypothesized implicatures and where the outcome is a narrowing of a lexically
encoded meaning:
(36) A (to B): Be careful. The path is uneven.
Given that the first part of A’s utterance warns B to take care, B is very likely to ex-
pect the second part of the utterance to achieve relevance by explaining or elabor-
ating on why, or in which way, he should take care. Now, virtually every path is,
strictly speaking, uneven to some degree or other (i.e. not perfectly plane), but
given that B is looking for a particular kind of implication, he will enrich the very
general encoded concept UNEVEN so that the proposition explicitly communicated
provides appropriate inferential warrant for such implications of the utterance as:
B might trip over, B should take small steps, B should keep his eye on the path, etc.
The result is a concept, which we can label UNEVEN *, whose denotation is a proper
subset of the denotation of the lexical concept UNEVEN . Provided the interpretation
as a whole satisfies the hearer’s context-specific expectations of relevance
(licensed by the general presumption of optimal relevance carried by all utter-
ances), it is accepted as the intended meaning. For much more detailed exemplifi-
cations of the relevance-theoretic account of lexical meaning modulation, see Wil-
son and Sperber (2002), and for demonstrations of how the mutual adjustment
mechanism brings about other pragmatic developments, including disambiguation
and saturation, in deriving explicatures, see Wilson and Sperber (2004).
So are we any closer to characterising the notion of a pragmatic ‘development’
of logical form, which plays such a key role in the definition of explicature as dis-
tinct from implicature? We believe there is an interesting difference in both the do-
main and the output of the processes involved in deriving the two kinds of speaker
meaning: whereas implicatures are derived by global inference from fully proposi-
tional premises, what is common to the various pragmatic processes that develop
the logical form into an explicature is that they are local. What we mean by a prag-
matic process being local is that it applies to a subpropositional constituent, or,
more specifically, a subpart of the linguistically encoded logical form and it is the
output of this pragmatic process that goes into the meaning composition process.17
The most obvious processes exemplifying the localness of ‘development’ are dis-
ambiguation and reference assignment: in the online comprehension of (37), for in-

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stance, the indexical is assigned a referent and it is this referent that is composed
together with the semantic/pragmatic values of the other expressions to give a fully
propositional content:
(37) He is swimming.
This is widely agreed to be a far more plausible story about processing than that the
hearer first composes the standing linguistic meanings of the lexical items, deriv-
ing something like ‘some male is swimming’, and then uses that as the starting
point for explicature development.
The lexical modulations (narrowings and broadenings) discussed in section 4.2
are also, clearly, local in this sense:
(38) a. France is hexagonal.
b. This steak is raw.
Here the encoded concepts HEXAGONAL and RAW are each replaced by a pragmati-
cally inferred concept (HEXAGONAL * and RAW *, respectively), which shares rel-
evant implications with the encoded concept, and it is these latter concepts that
enter into the composition process. A similar point can be made about (possible)
cases of unarticulated constituents:
(39) a. The ham sandwich [ORDERER ] wants his bill.
b. It will take [A LONG ] time.
c. Every boy [IN THE CLASS ] was there.
d. I’ve got nothing [SUITABLE FOR A WEDDING ] to wear.
When appropriately contextualized, the comprehension of a metonymy like
(39a), does not involve first computing the absurd ‘literal’ meaning on which a
culinary item wants the bill, then, once the absurdity is recognized, inferring that
the speaker was referring to the person who ordered it. Instead, the deferred
meaning is computed at the local level on a first processing pass and it is what
goes into the composition process (for discussion, see Recanati 1993, 2004; Sag
1981; Nunberg 1995). Similarly, the enrichment of (39b) involves a local modifi-
cation of the decoded concept TIME , rather than first recovering the trivially true
proposition (that the activity in question will take place over a period of time) and
only then inferring the relevant communicated proposition. Being trivially true,
the unenriched proposition would, of course, have no relevant implications of its
own, so the enrichment is necessary if the explicit content is to play any role in
further inference. Likewise, domain restriction, as in utterances of (39c) and
(39d), can also be seen to be local; for instance, Recanati (1993: 262–263) treats
(39c) as enrichment of the predicate BOY to BOY IN THE CLASS . Inferring implica-
tures, in contrast, is not a case of just modifying a subpart of the linguistically en-
coded meaning; rather, it is a global process in that it operates on fully proposi-
tional forms.18,19

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Assuming it is correct that the pragmatically inferred elements of explicatures

are derived locally, the question is: how does this line up with the requirement that
the explicature be the ‘intuitive truth-conditional content’ of the utterance? As we
have seen, ordinary speaker-hearers’ intuitions are sensitive not only to the truth-
conditional content of one particular proposition communicated by the utterance,
but also to those of other related propositions and people vary with regard to how
strict (how literal) they are in judging utterances as true/false. The distinction
based on the locality criterion will often coincide with one based on judgments
about the truth-conditional content of the utterance since the explicature is gen-
erally going to be highly salient to our judgments and, given that a substantial el-
ement of its content is linguistically encoded meaning, it is content that the speaker
can be held largely responsible for. However, when intuitions diverge, it is the deri-
vational distinction between local and global pragmatic inference that is the ulti-
mate arbiter about what constitutes an explicature and what an implicature. (See
Hall 2008b for further discussion of the local/global processing distinction.)
6. Conclusion: implicature, explicature and semantics
It seems that, in the move from Grice’s philosophically based saying/implicating

distinction to the cognitive communicative distinction between explicature and im-
plicature in relevance theory, the class of implicatures has become much reduced.
Most, if not all, cases of generalized implicatures have turned out to be local ad-
justments to subparts of the decoded logical form rather than propositions derived
by global inference. Thus their treatment as constituents of the proposition that is
explicitly communicated (explicature) is supported both intuitively and theoreti-
cally. However, the shift from implicature to explicature is not confined to the gen-
eralized cases. Several kinds of non-literal language use, including hyperbole,
metaphor and metonymy, whose communicated (speaker-meant) content was ana-
lysed as a matter of particularized implicature by Grice (and many after him), have
been reanalyzed as cases of local adjustments of encoded meaning, at the lexical or
phrasal level. Thus they also contribute elements of content to the proposition most
directly communicated by the speaker, that is, the explicature (see Carston 2002;
Wilson and Sperber 2002; Wilson and Carston 2007). So what is left of implicature
within this cognitive communicative picture?20
Implicatures are contextual implications that are speaker-meant (i.e. which fall
within the speaker’s communicative intention) and, as discussed in the previous
section, they are derived globally. Consider the following exchange:
(40) A: Who’s eaten my last chocolate egg?
B: Not me. Mary mentioned needing a chocolate fix.

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B’s utterance contextually implies that Mary is probably the person who ate A’s
chocolate egg and this implication is, in fact, strongly implicated by B since it
would be very difficult for A to satisfy his expectations regarding the relevance of
B’s utterance without inferring this conclusion. This implicature is inferentially
warranted by the explicature of the utterance together with highly accessible con-
textual assumptions including: people who are in need of a chocolate fix are likely
to eat whatever chocolate they can lay their hands on; A’s chocolate egg was within
Mary’s reach.21 This implicature is clearly entirely dependent on the specific con-
text, in particular the preceding question, and this is typical of implicatures on the
relevance-theoretic account; there are no default implicatures (compare Levinson
2000) nor implicatures that are highly generalized across contexts. In this respect,
the class of implicatures is a more unified communicative phenomenon than it was
in Grice’s account (and in current neo-Gricean frameworks).
According to the relevance-theoretic account, implicatures are more or less
strongly communicated, depending on the extent to which they can be taken to
have been specifically intended by the speaker. The example just discussed is a
case of a strongly communicated implicature since establishing the relevance of
the utterance depends heavily on the recovery of that particular implication. In
other cases, the speaker may have in mind a wider range of possible implications,
various subsets of which would contribute adequately and equally to the relevance
of her utterance, and none of which she intends more specifically than any others.
A simple example of this is the following:
(41) A has been devoting her time and energy for many weeks to helping B with
his dissertation. Finally, she says:
It’s up to you now.
Among the possible implications of her utterance are: I have given you enough
help with your dissertation; I cannot give you any more help; you need to take re-
sponsibility for your own work; you should not continue to ask me for advice; you
have the ability to complete the dissertation; and so on. It is not clear that she in-
tends any particular one (or two) of these and provided B derives several of them as
implicatures of the utterance he will have grasped the relevance of A’s utterance.
There are, of course, cases of even more weakly communicated implicatures as in
some highly creative and evocative uses of language for which hearers/readers
may derive implications that are so weakly implicated that it is not clear whether
they are intended by the speaker/writer at all. For further discussion of degrees of
strength of implicature, see Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995: 197–202; 2008).
Another respect in which the way implicatures are construed in relevance the-
ory differs from the Gricean conception is that entailments can, on occasion, be im-
plicated. Consider the following exchange:

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(42) X: Does John like cats?

Y: He doesn’t like any animals.
a. C ATS ARE ANIMALS .
b. J OHN DOESN ’ T LIKE CATS .
c. D OGS ARE ANIMALS .
d. J OHN DOESN ’ T LIKE DOGS .
According to the relevance-theoretic account, all of (a)–(d) are (potential) impli-

catures of Y’s utterance in the context of X’s question, with (a) and (c) as impli-
cated premises and (b) and (d) as implicated conclusions. The (a)/(b) pair are
strongly communicated in that X must recover them in order to understand the ut-
terance. The (c)/(d) pair are communicated less strongly since assumptions with
this exact content need not be derived, though some assumptions of this sort are
likely to be recovered, given Y’s general and indirect response to X. Both (42b)
and (42d) are entailed by Y’s utterance of He doesn’t like any animals and, on this
basis, Griceans tend to assume that they cannot be implicatures and instead treat
them as part of what is said (explicitly communicated). However, according to the
relevance-theoretic view, since they are communicated by the utterance, they are
either explicatures or implicatures, and they cannot be explicatures because the ut-
terance does not encode a logical form from which they could be developed.
This prediction is backed up by the fact that the way the example works is es-
sentially parallel to the following one, where there is no dispute about (a)–(d)
being (potential) implicatures, rather than explicatures, of Y’s utterance:
(43) X: Have you read Susan’s book?
Y: I don’t read crime fiction.
a. S USAN ’ S BOOK IS CRIME FICTION .
b. Y HASN ’ T READ S USAN ’ S BOOK .
c. A GATHA C HRISTIE ’ S BOOKS ARE CRIME FICTION
d. Y HASN ’ T READ A GATHA C HRISTIE ’ S BOOKS .
The only difference between the two cases is that there happens to be an entailment
relation between the proposition expressed and the (alleged) implicatures in (42b)
and (42d), but no such entailment relation in (43). The derivation process in both
cases is the same: in order to establish the relevance of Y’s utterance as an answer
to his question, X has to access the premise in (a) in each case, from which the con-
clusion in (b), which answers his question, follows. There is not even, necessarily,
any difference in the accessibility of the premises in the two cases, since X may or
may not already have them stored as part of his general knowledge. If he does, he
can retrieve them ready-made; if he does not, he has to construct them in accord-
ance with a standard inferential procedure based on the speaker’s indirect response
to his question. In the (c)/(d) pairs in each case, there is only one possible process-
ing route: in the first example, the hearer looks into his encyclopaedic entry for ani-

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mals and pulls out his assumption that dogs are animals, from which, given the ex-
plicature, the conclusion in (42d) follows; in the second case, he consults his
knowledge of crime fiction and retrieves the assumption about Agatha Christie’s
books, from which, given the explicature, the conclusion in (43d) follows.
We would extend this analysis to the following examples, although they are
perhaps a little more controversial:
(44) A: Have you invited any men to the dinner?

B: I’ve invited my father.
Implicature: B HAS INVITED AT LEAST ONE MAN .
(45) A: I can’t face lentil bake again tonight; I’m desperate for some meat.
B: Good. I’ve just bought some pork.
Implicature: B HAS JUST BOUGHT SOME MEAT .
On the relevance-theoretic account, word meanings are atomic (i.e. unstructured)
rather than decompositional: father encodes FATHER, pork encodes PORK (for strong
supporting arguments, see Fodor 1998; Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995: 90–93).
Thus, the derivation of the communicated assumptions that B has invited a man, in
(44), and that B has bought some meat, in (45), is an entirely inferential process, in
fact a straightforward logical inference, so the mechanism involved is essentially
the same as that for any implicated conclusion.22
For Grice, entailments and implicatures were mutually exclusive, a view which
remains widespread among neo-Griceans and which is a natural consequence of an
account in which a notion of ‘what is said’ is doing double duty as both semantics
and explicitly communicated proposition (as discussed in section 2). In our view,
the concept of entailment and the concept of implicature belong to different ex-
planatory levels, in fact different sorts of theory, the one a static description of our
native speaker knowledge of linguistic meaning, the other an account of the cog-
nitive processes and representations involved in understanding utterances, so there
is no reason at all why one and the same element of meaning should not fall into
both categories.
Finally, let us return to the issue of whether there is a minimal proposition sem-
antically expressed by a sentence. Unlike Grice, current semantic minimalists ac-
knowledge that ‘what is said’ by a speaker (explicature) is very much a matter of
pragmatics and thus they make a clear distinction between it and their favoured no-
tion of semantic content (Borg 2004: 127–131; Cappelen and Lepore 2005: 204).
For Cappelen and Lepore, the minimal semantic content of an utterance is that
proposition that results from the conventional linguistic meaning of the sentence
(its lexical items and syntax) and the fixing of the referents of any overt indexicals/
demonstratives and the disambiguation of any ambiguous terms. They consider
this notion of semantic content to be of central importance in an account of human
verbal communication for two (related) reasons: it provides a reliable fallback con-

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tent when something goes awry in the speaker-hearer communicative enterprise

and it constitutes a content that can be shared across divergent contexts, ensuring a
reasonable degree of stability in the propositions we attribute to each other, agree
or disagree with, debate about, and act upon, across time and place. Cappelen and
Lepore’s reasoning is that the amount of pragmatic work (non-demonstrative in-
ference) that goes into explicature undermines the possibility of its being a share-
able content as it is very unlikely that all the necessary details of the original con-
text and speaker’s intentions are carried across subsequent contexts enabling that
content to be reliably inferred time after time. So explicature cannot serve as
shared content, but nor can the kind of encoded linguistic meaning envisaged in
relevance theory, since this is generally a subpropositional logical form while the
kind of content looked for is propositional (truth-evaluable). Cappelen and Le-
pore’s minimal propositions appear to fulfil the requirements of ‘shared content’,
being truth-evaluable, yet determined largely semantically, requiring relatively
little pragmatic work (just disambiguation and saturation of overt indexicals).23
However, several authors have argued (e.g. Carston 2008b; Wedgwood 2007)
that Cappelen and Lepore’s minimal proposition is not really well suited to play the
role of shared content and this is for two quite distinct reasons. First, it just is not
reliably shared across contexts because it must incorporate the results of variable
saturation, a process which frequently requires substantial knowledge of the orig-
inal context/intentions: consider the specific information required for working out
the referents of this and that on different occasions of use, or of deciding whether
here means IN E NGLAND , IN L ONDON , IN THIS BUILDING , IN THIS ROOM , or some-
thing even more specific. All that a contextually disoriented addressee (or reporter)
can turn to for some degree of semantic anchoring is the linguistically encoded
meaning, which is typically nonpropositional. Second, even if the minimal prop-
osition were common across all contexts in which the original utterance is reported
and its content evaluated, it would not provide the right kind of shared content for
most of the purposes to which we would want to put such a notion. As Cappelen
and Lepore seem to concede (2005: 13–14, 58; 2007: 210), most instances of mini-
mal semantic content are not the communicated content of speech acts, from which
it follows that they are not the kind of content that enters into our debates and ne-
gotiations with each other, the kind of content that we hold people responsible for
and on which we base our actions – rather, that content is the explicature (prag-
matically enriched ‘what is said’) of our utterances. Thus, on the one hand, the
minimal proposition that is claimed to be semantically expressed is not minimal
enough and, on the other hand, it is too minimal. We conclude that it is not a psy-
chologically real construct.24
On our account of linguistic communication, there are two quite distinct kinds
of semantics. First, there is linguistic semantics, which concerns the meaning en-
coded by linguistic expression types. This consists of concepts (and procedures –
see note 20), that is, constituents of the language of thought (Mentalese), and

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grasping linguistic meaning is a matter of mapping or translating linguistic forms

onto conceptual constituents of thought. This kind of semantic representation is
usually subpropositional, hence not truth-evaluable. Second, there is truth-condi-
tional semantics, which captures the content of thoughts. It is thoughts (realized as
sentences in Mentalese) that are the primary bearers of truth conditions, from
which it follows that explicatures and implicatures (communicated thoughts) have
a truth-conditional semantics.
Notes
1. We would like to acknowledge funding to Robyn Carston from the Centre for the Study of
Mind in Nature at the University of Oslo, and to Alison Hall from a British Academy
Postdoctoral Fellowship.
2. Throughout the chapter, we use small caps to represent propositions, thoughts or concep-
tual representations, in order to distinguish them from sentences and other natural lan-
guage expressions.
3. For a particularly clear explanation of why communicative acts carry a presumption of
optimal relevance, and of the comprehension strategy it warrants and its nonapplicability
to both noncommunicative intentional acts and unintentional phenomena observed in the
world, see Sperber and Wilson (2002).
4. Grice’s attempt to extend this treatment to natural language indicative conditionals and so
maintain that they are semantically identical to material implication, hence wholly truth-
functional, foundered on the basis of his observation that for natural language condi-
tionals that carry an implicature (concerning, say, a cause-consequence relation between
antecedent and consequent), the negation of the conditional has to be interpreted as deny-
ing not the semantic content but the implicature (Grice: 1967/89: 83). However, given the
possibility of extensive pragmatic enrichment at the level of explicit content, which we
discuss in section 4, it may be that Grice’s preferred truth-functional treatment can be
maintained for if as well as for and and or while accommodating the richer non-truth-
functional understanding of the utterances containing them.
5. For this reason, Grice was driven to his talk of ‘making as if to say’ in the case of meta-
phorical and other non-literal uses of language. Although a propositional semantic con-
tent is expressed by such uses, it is not part of the speaker’s meaning, so it is not ‘said’, in
his favoured sense. See Grice (1975).
6. Most contemporary semantic minimalists would agree about the existence of this distinc-
tion between explicitly and implicitly communicated contents: Borg (2004) distinguishes
what is asserted from what is implicated; Salmon (1991) and Soames (2002) recognize a
‘pragmatic what is said’ in contrast to both implicatures and a ‘strict, semantic’ notion of
what is said; Bach (1994) has ‘impliciture’ and implicature, which correspond roughly to
the explicature-implicature distinction we discuss here. Our difference with the minimal-
ist approach is that we reject the idea of an extra level of content, intermediate between
standing linguistic meaning and explicitly communicated meaning.
7. Kaplan’s distinction is much more limited in scope, though, than the cognitive distinction
between encoded meaning and explicit content – it’s only in the case of pronouns and
other indexical expressions that the distinction really does some work. Strawson (1950)

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had already made a more thorough-going distinction between rules for use and ex-
pressed content, a precursor of some current views on encoded word meaning (e.g. Piet-
roski 2005).
8. Different versions of this proposal have the hidden indexical attached to the nominal
(Stanley and Szabó 2000), the determiner (von Fintel 1994; Martí 2003; Elbourne
2008), or adjoinable in different positions (Stanley 2005).
9. Martí (2006) suggests that such optionality can be accounted for without appeal to free
pragmatic enrichment by making the linguistic variables themselves optional, so that,
on the occasions when they do appear, saturation operates mandatorily, just as it does for
overt indexicals and uncontroversial cases of covert ones, such as pro-drop in Spanish
and other languages. We consider (and reject) this idea in Carston and Hall (forthcom-
ing).
10. A possible concern raised by such alleged unarticulated constituents is that they would
violate a basic semantic principle, the principle of compositionality, according to which
the semantic (truth-conditional) content of the whole utterance is derived from the sem-
antic value of each of its parts and the way in which they are syntactically combined.
However, this strict version of the principle has been questioned in recent years and a
pragmatics-sensitive compositional process has been proposed (Recanati 2004, 2012;
Pagin 2005).
11. In this paper, we do not discuss the notion of ‘higher-level’ explicatures concerning the
speaker’s attitude to the basic explicature content or the speech act she performs in ex-
pressing this basic explicature. Sentence adverbials such as frankly, seriously, happily,
and unfortunately, discussed in section 2 above, find a natural place in the relevance-
theoretic account as modifiers of such higher-level explicitly communicated proposi-
tions (for discussion, see Wilson and Sperber 1993 and Ifantidou 2001).
12. The wording is ‘“a” logical form’ (as opposed to “the”) in order to cover the case of am-
biguity, where a surface form encodes more than one logical form. It would also include
utterances which could be analyzed as encoding multiple logical forms, such as those
with parentheticals and non-restrictive relative clauses. For discussion of this definition
and a suggested amendment to it, see Carston (2002: 116–124).
13. A reasonable question here is: how can we be sure that B is not responding to an impli-
cature of A’s utterance? We probably cannot be completely sure, but it does seem to be
quite pragmatically infelicitous to immediately and directly contradict the implicature
of someone’s utterance. Consider C’s response to B in the following conversation:
A: Does Max have a girlfriend these days?
B: He visits New York every weekend.
C: No, he hasn’t. He goes to New York to see his ill mother.
C’s direct denial of B’s implicature that Max probably has a girlfriend seems odd (not
fully coherent), which is not at all the case for the examples in (29) – (32). For more dis-
cussion of this point, see Carston (2004b).
14. In a discussion of similar cases of embedding of scalar terms like some, two and or, King
and Stanley (2005: 147–150) maintain that there is standardly a focal stress on the el-
ement that is to be pragmatically modified (some in this case) and this makes salient the
requirement to find a contextually appropriate contrast set (here <some, all>). The up-
shot of their analysis is that, while the enrichment of some does contribute to the expli-
cature, it is not a case of ‘free’ pragmatic enrichment but is a linguistically mandated
pragmatic process.

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15. For discussion of this and other criteria for distinguishing pragmatic contributions to ex-
plicature from implicatures, see Carston (2002: 183–197). Recanati (1993: 269–274)
elevates the embedding test to what he labels the ‘Scope Principle’ and discusses some
of the pitfalls in its application. For related discussion, see also Levinson (2000) on
what he calls ‘intrusive constructions’ and King and Stanley’s (2005) response.
16. However, when the sentences are presented decontextualized (as we have done in (33) –
(35)), what hearers/readers do is try to treat them as utterance tokens, that is, they tend to
imagine a kind of default context – the first one that comes to mind in which it would
seem appropriate to utter such a sentence.
17. Recanati (1995, 2004) makes a much stronger distinction between pragmatic processes
of explicature derivation and those responsible for implicatures. He calls the former
‘primary’ pragmatic processes and characterizes them as subpersonal and non-inferen-
tial (associative), while the latter ‘secondary’ processes are person-level and properly
inferential. See Carston (2007) for critical discussion of this primary/secondary process
distinction and a comparison with the relevance-theoretic approach, and see Recanati
(2007b) for his reply.
18. The recent analysis of scalar inferences by Noveck and Sperber (2007) provides an ex-
cellent demonstration of this local/global distinction: in their view, local lexical modu-
lation of scalar terms like some, most, often, good, probable, etc. is general and frequent
across utterances, but, occasionally, when expectations of relevance demand it, a dis-
tinct proposition, an implicature, is derived by a global inferential process (e.g. the
proposition N OT ALL OF THE STUDENTS PASSED THE EXAM would very likely be impli-
cated by a speaker who utters ‘Some of them did’ in response to the question ‘Did all of
the students pass the exam?’).
19. An interesting question we have yet to consider is whether ‘higher-level’ explicatures
concerning speaker attitude and speech act (see note 11) meet our ‘local development’
criterion.
20. Grice’s category of conventional implicature (turning on such non-truth-conditional
words as but, moreover and therefore, discussed above in section 2) has been entirely
transformed in the move to the cognitively-based relevance-theoretic framework.
Blakemore (1987, 2002) has argued persuasively for these words being analysed as en-
coding ‘procedural’ meaning, which functions to constrain the pragmatic inferential
process of deriving contextual implications. See also Wilson and Sperber (1993), who
extend the notion of procedural encoding to a wider range of words, some of which con-
strain pragmatic processes that contribute to explicature. Coming from a different (non-
cognitive) perspective, Bach (1999) argues that there is no such thing as conventional
implicatures and reanalyses a number of Grice’s cases in other terms.
21. In relevance theory, speaker-intended contextual assumptions such as these are also
classified as implicatures (implicated premises). These are, of course, also globally de-
rived since they are retrieved as a whole from perception or memory. Recanati (2004:
48–49) does not think that so-called ‘implicated premises’ are genuine implicatures in
that they tend to be not part of what is communicated but part of what the speaker takes
for granted (presupposes) and expects the hearer to take for granted. This is an interest-
ing issue that needs further thought.
22. Many entailments of an uttered sentence are not communicated at all and when they are
communicated some are implicatures (as discussed above) and some are explicatures
(e.g. the conjuncts in and-conjunctions). For further discussion, see Carston (2002:
121–125, 139–141).

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23. It is less clear why Borg (2004) is so insistent on the propositionality of sentence mean-
ing other than that she has an antecedent commitment to the Davidsonian truth-condi-
tional programme for natural language semantics. For some discussion of Borg’s sem-
antic minimalism, see Carston (2008a).
24. However, the issue of shared content that drives Cappelen and Lepore is an important
one and remains to be tackled within an account like ours on which propositions ex-
pressed and statements made are very pragmatic (context-sensitive) entities.
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3.

Implicature and explicature

The explicature/implicature distinction is one manifestation of the distinction be-

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require.3 It is in the (non-demonstrative) inferential process of looking for an inter-

2. How it all began: semantic content and implicature

(6) Mary is a housewife but she is very intelligent.

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(7) Amy insulted Max and he resigned.

3. From ‘what is said’ to explicature

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meantness and a minimalist, albeit truth-conditional, semantics – in a single notion

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and a fully pragmatic (speaker-meant) notion of ‘what is said’. For discussion of

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4. The pragmatics of explicature

4.1. Linguistically unarticulated constituents of content

(12) a. There’s milk in the fridge.

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(13) a. Max: Would you like to stay for supper.

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There is a vigorous ongoing discussion about whether it is extensive covert lin-

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cation is so frequently communicated is because the relevance of an episode of

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(18) a. Every Frenchman is seated.

(19) a. John likes Sally.

This overgeneration objection is potentially serious and it has been addressed in

4.2. Pragmatic adjustment of word meaning

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4.3. Reconstrual of some cases of Gricean implicature

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indexical saturation, there is a range of pragmatic processes that enrich or other-

(26) a. Hannah reported Joe for misconduct and he was fired.

In many contexts, an utterance of (25a) will communicate the proposition in (25b),

5. Explicature/implicature – How to draw the distinction

5.1. Intuitions and tests

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(27) a. Robert broke a finger last night.

On a Gricean account, what is said by an utterance of (27a) would be as given

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(28) a. Some lecturers are insecure.

Arguably, a pragmatic component of content contributes to the explicature in each

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(31) A: Bob’s a bit of a bulldozer.

(32) A: No one goes to that club any more.

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tional aspects of the conjunctions contribute to the explicatures of the conjunctive

5.2. Relevance-based derivation of explicatures and implicatures:

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Assuming it is correct that the pragmatically inferred elements of explicatures

6. Conclusion: implicature, explicature and semantics