Dimensions of Implication A Review of the Saying-Meaning-Implying Trichotomy

Abstract

Grice’s distinction between what is said and what is implicated in the theory of Conversational Implicature is a sketchy proposal, because what is said is quite complex and is the main source of controversy among the philosophers of language and linguists. This article aims at reviewing the modern theories of meaning. Semanticists, linguists and language philosophers have posited meaning in various dichotomies: sentence meaning / utterance meaning; sentence meaning/ speaker meaning; saying / implying, implicature/ explicature; implicature/ entailment; implicature/presupposition; implicature/ enrichment; implicature/ inference. These meaning dichotomies have failed to address the question of whether or not implication should be recognized as a two-way process or a three-way process. In Grice’s theory, ‘what is said’ can be envisaged in two more distinctions: ‘what is said versus what is implicated’, and ‘what is said versus what is meant.’ Moreover, after the establishment of the implicature notion, some linguists and language philosophers argued for additional terms to account for other aspects of pragmatic inferences that implicature theory has failed to recover. In conclusion, it is believed that the traditional account of meaning dichotomy, which is between what is said and what is implicated, is better substituted with trichotomy: what is said, what is meant, and what is implicated.