On explicatures, cancellability and cancellation

Abstract

Within the Gricean framework only what is conversationally implicated is cancellable, whereas what is conventionally implicated and what is said cannot be cancelled without giving rise to contradiction. In the relevance-theoretic framework, however, the question is whether explicatures, which replace the Gricean notion of what is said, are cancellable. In recent years, various objections to the cancellability of explicatures have been raised. The aim of the present paper is to demonstrate that these objections are due to a misinterpretation of the Gricean cancellability test. In particular, they disregard the fact that this test is merely one of several diagnostic tools that are used by Grice to distinguish between conventional and conversational implicatures. Once we have recognized the essence of the cancellability test, the objections to the cancellability of explicatures turn out to be unwarranted.

Are Conversational Implicatures Cancellable? A Critical Review of Grice’s Cancellability Test

“…As thus, the speaker's commitment to the meaning of utterances becomes the prerequisite of "what is implicate" (Blome-Tillmann, 2008;Feng, 2013). To my knowledge, however, Grice's cancellability criteria are built upon the utterance content rather than the real context where the speaker uses the sentence (Walczak, 2016). As the matter of fact, cancellability test serves as a demonstrative for scholars to conduct semantic/pragmatic analyses, far from what is called "speaker cancellation" (Burton-Roberts, 2010, p. 9) holded by backers for Published by SCHOLINK INC.…”

On the Distribution of Missing Arguments and Adjuncts under the Pro Approach

“…We have to note that the semantic content of the sentence that is uttered generally underdetermines what is said. Hence, what is said depends more on pragmatic processes such as various enrichment and adjustment processes (Clark 2013, Walczak 2016. It is generally assumed that these pragmatic enrichment processes (sometimes known as "explicature") is a combination of linguistically encoded and contextually inferred conceptual features from implicit materials.…”

“…As pointed by Carston (1988), Walczak (2016) and many others, cancellability is a property of any and all aspects of utterance meaning which are derived pragmatically. Since free pragmatic enrichment process (also known as "explicature") is linguistic/pragmatic hybrid, some content of this pragmatic process is cancellable.…”