On Communicative Intention And Saying/implicating Distinction Cover Image

O komunikativnim namerama i distinkiciji izmedju kazivanja i implikature
On Communicative Intention And Saying/implicating Distinction

Author(s): Ivana Lj. Stojanović-Prelević
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies
Published by: Универзитет у Нишу
Keywords: communicative intention; implicature; explicature; Grice circle

Summary/Abstract: Theory of communication describes communication as speech acts which produce communicative intentions. Grice thinks that it is important for successful communication that the hearer recognizes the speaker's communicative intention. For Relevance Theorists, intention determines truth conditions of utterance content. Meaning determination is an inference process which aims at the articulation of the speaker's intention. It is not just the communicative intention phenomenon which determines meaning; implicatures and explicatures do so, too. Grice distinguishes between the content of "What is said" and "What is implicated". "What is said" is equated with the truth-conditional content of the utterance and with sentence meaning, while "what is implicated" is equated with the pragmatic domain (communicative intention). Relevance Theorists have a different view, according to which linguistic semantics is the output of a modular linguistic decoding system and serves as an input to a pragmatic processor. In this paper, the author will present the distinction between Grice's and Relevance Theorists' (Sperber and Wilson, Carston) determination of the communicative intention and the implicature/explicature distinction.

  • Issue Year: 09/2011
  • Issue No: 2
  • Page Range: 107-114
  • Page Count: 8
  • Language: English