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9.1: Introduction

  • Page ID
    138670
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    Grice’s work on implicatures triggered an explosion of interest in pragmatics. In the subsequent decades, a wide variety of applications, extensions, and modifications of Grice’s theory have been proposed.

    One focus of the theoretical discussion has been the apparent redundancy in the set of maxims and sub-maxims proposed by Grice. Many pragmaticists have argued that the same work can be done with fewer maxims.1 In the extreme case, proponents of Relevance Theory have argued that only the Principle of Relevance is needed.

    Rather than focusing on such theoretical issues directly, in this chapter we will discuss some of the analytical questions that have been of central importance in the development of pragmatics after Grice. In §9.2 we return to the question raised in Chapter 4 concerning the degree to which the English words and, or, and if have the same meanings as the corresponding logical operators. Grice himself suggested that some apparently distinct “senses” of these words could be analyzed as generalized conversational implicatures. §9.3 discusses a type of pragmatic “enrichment” that seems to be required in order to determine the truth-conditional meaning of a sentence. §9.4 discusses how the relatively clean and simple distinction between semantics vs. pragmatics which we have been assuming up to now is challenged by recent work on implicatures.


    1 See Birner (2012/2013: ch. 3) for a good summary of the competing positions on this issue.


    This page titled 9.1: Introduction is shared under a CC BY 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Paul Kroeger (Language Library Press) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.