Drawing More Lines: Response to Depraetere and Salkie

Abstract

It is now widely recognized that there is a middle ground between being literal and fully explicit in meaning something and merely implicating it. In this case what the speaker means is, unlike implicature, an enrichment of the semantic content of the uttered sentence. The hearer needs to recognize that this semantic content includes only part of what the speaker could mean, either because it falls short of comprising a proposition or because the proposition it does comprise is not specific enough to be what the speaker could plausibly be supposed to mean. The speaker intends to communicate, depending on the case, either a completion or an expansion of the semantic content. Depraetere & Salkie propose a novel conception of this distinction, on which disambiguation counts as a case of completion and resolving semantic underspecification counts as expansion (free pragmatic enrichment). Although their approach makes sense from the standpoint of the hearer’s task of figuring out what a speaker means, I will suggest that the completion/expansion distinction as well as several important subordinate distinctions should be understood more abstractly, as different relations between what the speaker means and the semantic content of the uttered sentence.