Whose meaning?

The primary focus of many scholars in analyzing pragmatic meaning has been on representations of speaker meaning. We point out that speaker meaning is much more complex than might appear at first. Indeed, it constitutes just one of a number of threads we need to consider in any analysis of pragmatic meaning, since what has been relatively neglected in many accounts of pragmatic meaning thus far is just whose meaning representation is at issue, in other words, the perspective of the user.

It is generally assumed that it is speakers who mean things, while hearers are the ones who figure out what speakers are meaning in or through what they say. However, a focus on speaker meaning can inadvertently mask two quite different perspectives: that of the speaker and that of the hearer. According to Grice, the notion of conversational implicature, for instance, is simply what the speaker makes available to hearers through maintaining the assumption that Cooperative Principle is being observed. The conversational implicatum (or implicata in the plural) that speakers and recipients actually entertain are thus regarded as a distinct matter, as we discussed. There was subsequently, however, a general move in pragmatics towards analyzing the hearer’s representation of the speaker’s intended meaning representation, particularly amongst Relevance theorists (and other contextualists), who analyze speaker meaning from the perspective of the hearer’s reconstruction of it via their inferences about speaker’s intended meaning. There is thus an underlying assumption that in “successful communication” the speaker’s intended meaning (e.g. an implicature) and the hearer’s inference about it (e.g. an implicatum) can be treated as if they are virtually synonymous (Carston 2002; Sperber and Wilson [1986]1995; see also Levinson 2000).