Stage 7 of the journey moves to utterance meaning and to various ways of explaining how speakers communicate more than what the sentence says. It introduces the intention-and-inference-based concept of meaning in Grice’s and post-Gricean pragmatics, travelling though maxims, principles, and heuristics proposed by various scholars of this orientation. It then moves to introducing (i) approaches that advocate the ‘maximalist’, contextualist semantic content and (ii) semantic minimalism that preserves a much clearer boundary between semantics and pragmatics – suggesting ‘food for thought’ at many points in the discussion.

The chapter addresses the relation between post-Gricean pragmatics and intercultural pragmatics. As such, it addresses meaning in relation to intentions and inferences and provides an overview of the main developments in this tradition, placing them in the context of the utility they have for understanding cross-cultural communication, and specifically the acquisition of pragmatic competence. Section 1.2 introduces the concept of pragmatic universals and moves to discussing how Grice’s account of cooperative conversational behavior can be viewed as such pragmatic universal principles. After pointing out some problems with Grice’s original account as it is seen from the perspective of several decades, Section 1.3 proceeds to post-Gricean approaches to linguistic communication, focusing not so much on the traditional debates concerning the number and scope of the necessary maxims or principles (covered briefly in Section 1.3.1) but rather on the semantics/pragmatic boundary and the related question of the truth-conditional content that opened up interesting contextualist pursuits (Section 1.3.2). Section 1.4 addresses different versions of contextualism and places them in the context of the debates between minimalists and contextualists. Section 1.5 concludes with comments on the utility of post-Gricean pragmatics for intercultural communication, stressing the significance of pragmatic universals.

In a seminal contribution, Paul Grice took what he called the ‘total signification of an utterance’ (i.e. the complete content someone communicates by a linguistic signal) and divided it in two, distinguishing between ‘what the speaker says’ versus ‘what the speaker implies’. However, recent developments have served to throw doubt on Grice’s taxonomy, with both sides of his divide coming under fire. I examine these challenges to Grice’s framework, but argue that they do not show that Grice’s notion of implicature is ill-founded, nor that his ’favoured sense’ of what is said is unnecessary. What they do serve to highlight is a peculiar tension in Grice’s original account. For it seems Grice merged two distinct features when defining what the speaker says versus what the speaker implicates: the idea of a content dictated by word meaning and structure alone, on the one hand, and the idea of an asserted or directly expressed proposition on the other. Yet once we resolve this tension it is possible to deliver an account of the total signification of an utterance which is both (fairly) faithful to Grice’s original account and which is able to do a great deal of explanatory work.

This chapter begins with an overview of several terms important to a discussion of meaning in language, and introduces the reader to the theory of linguistic relativism and the relationship between language and thought. This section transitions into a review of the extension, reference, and the features that begin to form a comprehensive theory of semantics. With this foundation, students turn to a deeper investigation of formal semantics, including definitions for logical expressions and relationships, and then to a presentation of word sense, and the interactions between various parts of speech in the lexicon. The principle of compositionality is introduced, and it is used to explore several examples of non-compositional language. The end of the chapter ties these concepts to an investigation of pragmatics, including politeness, Gricean Maxims, and implicature.

This chapter covers the notions of inference and implicature from a broad pragmatic and sociopragmatic perspective. Starting from the fact that inference has wide applicability also in psychology and logic, while implicature is limited only to pragmatics, it opens by drawing three distinctions: (1) between inference in a broad and in a narrow sense, (2) between inference and implicature and (3) between inference and implicature as both product and process. It then discusses processes of implicature generation within Gricean and post-Gricean accounts. While the general position taken is that 'speakers implicate, hearers infer', this position is also problematized by drawing on sociopragmatics research that challenges the notion of the speaker’s intention and explores how (else) meaning can be generated.

Every reputable new English dictionary, or new edition, published since 1987 has made use of a large collection of text, or ‘corpus’, for evidence of a word’s usage. In this chapter, one of the most eminent names in lexicography, Patrick Hanks, takes the reader on a journey to discover more about different kinds of dictionaries and corpora, and basic principles of corpus linguistics and lexicography. He outlines how dictionaries have made use of corpus evidence in the past, and proposes how they might make better use of them in the future.

Plausible deniability is a common feature of political discourse that allows speakers to avoid taking responsibility for a controversial utterance by invoking possible counter-interpretations. To engage in plausible deniability, Trump invokes seemingly reasonable evidence to contest or refute that he meant what he said, foregrounding only select elements of the meaning-making process while downplaying others. Trump’s use of plausible deniability allows him to rally his base while feigning innocence when confronted about controversial remarks. Although common to politics, Trumpian discourse pushes this language game to the limits of credulity through frequent acts of strategic denying that arouse both supporters and critics. This chapter analyzes the way Trump and his allies engage in plausible deniability through the examination of several high-profile cases, introducing the linguistic concept of “implicature” to shed light on the discursive moves and interpretive processes that underlie attempts to invoke plausible deniability. Key to deconstructing each of these examples is an anthropological understanding of the interactional context in which political remarks are spoken and understood.

Preference for semantic analyzability in ELF creates “utterer-implicatures” that usually do not implicate anything beyond what is said. But still we have kept calling them implicatures and not “implicitures” or “explicatures” as they are called in the Gricean literature because they are the results of the same mechanism as in L1. In ELF interactions there is a kind of pragmaticization of semantics which is a synchronic, one-off phenomenon in which coded meaning, sometimes without any specific pragmatic enrichment based on the target language, obtains temporary pragmatic status. ELF speakers need this online pragmaticalization because they cannot rely on pragmatic effects as in L1. So ELF users need to build up temporary frames and norms in the course of interaction. Actual situation context does not help because it is understood differently by interlocutors. So ELF users will produce and interpret a pragmatic act, including implicatures, mainly based on its semantic content that is pragmaticized not by the actual contextual effect or core common ground but by prior context and co-constructed emergent common ground. This ELF pragmatics relies not on existing norms and conventions but rather on emergent intention, innovation, emergent common ground, online frame building and one-off strategies.

Nicholas Allott considers how relevance theory can be seen as responding to doubts about the possibility of any kind of systematic pragmatic theory. He considers three sceptical positions: Fodor’s argument that pragmatic processes are not amenable to scientific study because they are unencapsulated (highly context-sensitive), Chomsky’s claim that human intentional action is a mystery rather than a scientifically tractable problem, and a third view which maintains that intentional communication is too complex for systematic study. Allott argues that work in relevance theory can be seen as successfully challenging these sceptical views and he gives concrete examples of its achievements.

In this chapter, Jacques Moeschler addresses some complex issues about the function of negation and its interaction with metarepresentation.He identifies three distinct uses of negation, namely, descriptive negation and two kinds of metarepresentational negation (one metalinguistic, the other presupposition-cancelling), which differ in their semantic entailments. His key claim is that all three of them have what he calls ‘representational’ (or propositional) effects on the context, specifically the elimination and/or the strengthening of existing assumptions, albeit different for each of the uses.