Explicit Import Revisited: A Critical Appraisal of Explicatures

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to argue that the way explicitly communicated content is approached in leading pragmatic theories is flawed, since it is posited that explicature generation involves pragmatic enrichment of the decoded logical form of the utterance to full propositionality. This kind of enhancement postulated to underlie explicature generation appears to be theoretically inadequate and not to correspond to the psychological reality of utterance interpretation. Drawing on earlier critique of extant pragmatic positions on explicatures, mainly by Borg (2016) and Jary (2016), I add further arguments against modelling explicitly communicated import in the way leading verbal communication frameworks do. It is emphasized that the cognitively plausible theory of communicated meaning is compromised at the cost of theory-internal concerns.