Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface

In the Conclusion, Chapter 10, of Recanati's book, he discusses the difference between his “Quasi-Contextualist” view and the view of Paul Grice. Besides the linguistic meaning of sentence-types, Grice has a view of “what is said” by the assertion of sentence-tokens. His view made the content of “what is said” a specification of the meaning of the sentence-token with values for the parameters of tense, indexical expressions, and demonstrative expressions – a notion of a “minimal” proposition expressed by the utterance. Any other differences between “what is said” and the utterance-interpretation of the speech-act were matters of context, of particularized and generalized conversational implicatures derived from the semantic content of “what is said” and from an assessment of the speaker's intentions by the addressee. Quasi-contextualism, in Recanati's (2004: 86) sense, is the view that “minimal propositions [are] theoretically useless” entities, which play “no role in communication.” Recanati remarks that he “has implicitly endorsed Quasi-Contextualism in arguing against the Syncretic View in Chapter 4.” The latter View draws a distinction between “what is said” in an intuitive sense and “what is said” strictly and literally. These views are typical of the American philosophers Nathan Salmon, Scott Soames, and Kent Bach. Recanati himself had earlier held such a view, but he has since given up defending the notion of a minimal proposition, still defended by Cappelen and Lepore and Borg.