Ivan Sobolev spoke on "What is Said and Implicated: Challenging Grice's Dichotomy of Meaning"

Research intern of IL LLFP Ivan Sobolev gave a presentation at the theoretical seminar "Formal Philosophy," which took place on May 23

Abstract

In his work "Logic and Conversation," Paul Grice proposed dividing utterance meaning into two fundamental components. First, there is the truth-conditional meaning of the sentence - "what is said" or semantic content. Second, there are conversational implicatures which, on one hand, arise through pragmatic phenomena when expressions are used in specific contexts, yet on the other hand, do not affect the truth value of the proposition expressed by the literal wording of the sentence. However, even in Grice's own work we can find mentions of certain natural language phenomena that don't neatly fit this said/implicated dichotomy. In my presentation, I will focus in detail on examples of such hybrid implicatures - particularly conventional and generalized conversational implicatures. I will demonstrate how pragmatic extensions can influence the truth status of utterances, while conventional semantic meaning may remain inert with respect to what is said.