Extant contextualist theories have relied on the mechanism of pragmatically driven modulation to explain the way non-indexical expressions take on different interpretations in different contexts. In this paper I argue that a modulation-based contextualist semantics is untenable with respect to non-ambiguous expressions whose invariant meaning fails to determine a unique literal interpretation, such as ‘lawyer’ ‘musician’ ‘book’ and ‘game’. The invariant meaning of such an expression corresponds to a range of closely related and equally basic interpretations, none of which can (...) be distinguished as the literal interpretation. Moreover, what counts as a literal interpretation as opposed to a non-literal one is arguably vague. The nonuniqueness of the literal interpretation and the vagueness in the literal/non-literal divide doubly challenge a modulation-based semantics, for modulation is supposed to operate on a unique literal interpretation to generate a clearly non-literal interpretation. Lastly I contend that non-ambiguous expressions which lack determinate literal interpretation are amenable to a Radical Contextualist semantics, according to which the invariant meaning of such an expression directs its interpretation to congruent background information in context. Thereby, these expressions exhibit semantically driven context sensitivity without displaying indexicality. (shrink)

In this paper, I show how normative inferentialism could be used to explain several phenomena related to natural languages. First, I show how the distinction between the inferential potential and the inferential significance fits the standard distinction between the meaning of a sentence and the content of an utterance. Second, I show how the distinction could be used to explain ambiguity and free pragmatic enrichment from the perspective of normative inferentialism. The aim of this paper is to establish theoretical foundations (...) that enable normative inferentialism to enter the discussions within the literalism-contextualism debate. As I argue, the biggest advantage of inferentialism is that it provides one general framework for the representation of meaning/content that naturally incorporates contextual information and so it can be used to represent meanings of various types of context-dependent sentences. (shrink)

The term ‘explicatures’ pertains to the inferential developments made of utterances with the objective of attaining a greater degree of clarity by the speaker (Sperber and Wilson 1986). It was first introduced by relevance theory to provide evidence that the explicit part of communication may contain a pragmatically inferred material, which facilitates communication and makes it more relevant (Carston. 2000. Explicature and semantics. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 12. 44–89). Nevertheless, there are instances where explicatures are deliberately not fully articulated (...) in order to achieve certain social meanings as well as communicative goals. This research article examines the social functions, which are accomplished when communicators do not articulate pragmatically inferred material which is part of the explicit content of the utterance. Based on the analysis of genuine communications, obtained from real-life interactions from Jordanian Arabic, this article demonstrates that the act of not fully articulating explicatures serves certain social purposes, such as not inviting evil eye, not damaging the positive face of the addressee or the person under discussion, and avoiding the explicit mentioning of delicate matters like illnesses and social taboos; hence conforming to the established social conventions. Furthermore, the results referred to a remarkable association between particular areas of explicatures identification and certain social functions. (shrink)