Analyzing pragmatic meaning Conclusion 

The analysis of pragmatic meaning, or meaning beyond what is said, as opposed to compositional or semantic meaning, has been one of the primary foci of research in pragmatics to date. The traditional Gricean view is that speaker meaning arises from inferences made by recipients about the speaker’s intentions. This amounts to the claim that speaker meaning arises from recipients figuring out what speakers intend to mean. Since it arises through pseudo-logical inferences, pragmatic meaning is generally assumed to be cancellable as opposed to what is said, which is not as straightforwardly cancellable. Such a view raises questions about the interface between the two types of meaning, that is, between pragmatic and semantic accounts of meaning, an issue which remains the subject of considerable debate, as we have seen.

We have also suggested that pragmatic meaning is much more complex and multi-faceted than the received view allows for. One key question that we have asked is: what kind of content or information are we talking about? In pragmatics we focus on meaning representations that encompass content or information beyond what is said or expressed. These include unsaid content such as presuppositions, which were discussed, and implicatures, which were discussed in more detail. But it also includes various representations that lie between what is (literally) said and what is implicated.

A second important question to ask is: whose meaning are we talking about? In pragmatics we are interested in users of language. The focus in pragmatics has traditionally been on so-called speaker meaning, which is generally conceptualized as either what the speaker intends to mean, or what the recipient thinks the speaker intends to mean. However, as we have seen, the received view underestimates the importance of other perspectives on pragmatic meaning, including those of various kinds of recipients, which arise independently of inferences about the speaker’s intentions. We have introduced the notions of footing and participation framework to allow for a more fi ne-grained analysis of different user perspectives on pragmatic meaning.

A third key question to ask is: how do pragmatic meanings arise in discourse and interaction? There are two ways in which we have approached this question. One way has been by focusing on the processes by which we understand meaning. In pragmatics the focus has traditionally been on understanding meaning at the level of utterances, with a particular emphasis on the cognitive processes by which participants figure out the meaning of utterances (as opposed to sentences), and what guides those processes. However, as we have seen, we can also approach the understanding of pragmatic meaning from the perspective of discourse processing, both within and across utterances. According to this view, the processes underlying pragmatic meaning involve the incremental and sequential intertwining of the cognitive processes and pragmatic meaning representations of different users. We can approach the analysis of pragmatic meaning in both ways. This is not to suggest that these two approaches to analyzing pragmatic meaning in context are complementary or even compatible, but simply to acknowledge there is always more than one way of looking at the world.

The flipside of understanding meaning is the way in which users can create meaning. Speakers may say something independently, or may jointly say something with another speaker. They may also imply or not say things in various ways. This has implications for the degree to which speakers (and/or recipients) are held to be committed to or accountable for particular instances of pragmatic meaning. This has generally been glossed over in many accounts of pragmatic meaning, although it was arguably central to Grice’s original program on the normative ways in which speaker meanings are made available to participants.

Notably, much of the theorization of pragmatic meaning rests on (intuitive) distinctions that are made in English between saying, implying, hinting and so on. There even appears to be some differences across varieties of English in the range of practices by which pragmatic meanings arise. The phenomenon of signifying in AAVE is a case in point. It thus remains a significant question for pragmatics whether such distinctions can always be straightforwardly applied across other languages. One thing is clear though: pragmatic meaning is complex. It can be understood and analyzed from multiple perspectives. While this sometimes makes it difficult to pin down analytically, it is also what makes it such a rich area of study in pragmatics.