ABSTRACT
It is unchallenged that pragmatics has developed into an established field of linguistic enquiry in the 1970s and especially 1980s. The question, though, where to draw the boundary between semantics and pragmatics, if at all, is still not settled. Particularly the last decade has seen an increasing number of publications, originating for the most part in Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory (see Wilson and Sperber 1981; Sperber and Wilson 1986; and in their wake, e.g. Blakemore 1987, 1988; Carston 1988a, 1988b; or Kempson 1988), in which the traditional Gricean distinction between these two fields is critically reconsidered. Above all, distinctions along the lines truth-conditional meaning (semantics) vs. non-truth-conditional meaning (pragmatics), or ‘what is said’ (semantics) vs. ‘what is meant’ (pragmatics) have become the focus of criticism. The alternative view is constantly gaining ground, even among critics of the Relevance-theoretic framework (see Levinson 1988, 1989), that pragmatic inferences are not only responsible for bridging the gap between ‘what is said’ and ‘what is meant’, but also for determining part of the propositional or truth-conditional meaning. In other words, the process of determining the propositional content is suggested to be the true meeting-point (or interface) of semantics and pragmatics. This means a substantial shift of the boundary between these two fields well into the realm formerly assigned to semantics.
