Previous seminars

Grice's 'what is said'

Seminar on Language and Communication <p><em>Wednesday, March 24, 11:30 am., </em></p><p><strong>Kepa Korta (ILCLI. University of the Basque Country) </strong><br><em>

Abstract

I'll call the operative content or of the utterance (OC, for short) what, in the Gricean framework, constitutes the input for the inference of implicatures of an utterance. After Grice, this is usually known as ‘what is said' by the utterance (namely, what is said by the speaker in making the utterance), but this is somewhat misleading, since it is then considered to correspond (in the case of simple utterances involving singular terms) to a single kind of proposition: either a singular proposition, i.e., a proposition involving an individual, or a general proposition, i.e., a proposition involving not an individual but a mode of presentation of it. I'll argue that the OC of an utterance can be any of a variety of contents, including but not limited to those two kinds of contents.