Title: epi-tlk
Author: Alan Buchanan
Last saved by: MTA
Company: University of Arizona

Abstract

	Testing For Implicitures

	Robert M. Harnish

	Department of Philosophy
	Department of Linguistics
	University of Arizona

Grice proposed to investigate "the total signification of the utterance".  One persistent criticism of Grice's taxonomy of signification is that he missed an important category of information that is not a part of the meaning of the sentence uttered, it is not a part of what Grice would have called what is said, and it is not a part of what is traditionally considered a conversational implicature.  This content, and/or the process of providing it, goes by a variety of labels: 'explicature', 'unarticulated constituents', 'default heuristics' 'impliciture': 

It's raining [here]
I've had breakfast [today]
You wont die [now, from that]
He went to the edge of the cliff and jumped [off it]
Anna turned the key and [so] the engine started
There's beer [to drink] in the refrigerator

Is the bracketed material semantic or pragmatic?  Is it really not a part of either what nor what is implicated?  Is it linguistically represented or not? Is it subject to compositional mechanisms?  Is the information recovered during utterance comprehension during sentence comprehension or after sentence comprehension?  And what are the mechanisms that provide this information during comprehension?  In this study we first take a sample of such phenomena and, from the point of view of pure pragmatics, survey the central descriptions of the content expressed and the mechanisms that might deliver these contents.  We then, from the point of view of experimental pragmatics, focus on two accounts: Levinson's I-heuristic, and Bach's standardization.  We propose two experiments for getting at the nature of this information and report on some preliminary experimental results that tend to favor one view over another.