ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the question of the relationship between linguistic form and interpretation that is raised by a rather different set of choices available to the communicator. On the one hand, communication may succeed provided that the proposition that the hearer receives bears a sufficient resemblance to the speaker's thought. The chapter explains verbal communication as involving a speaker producing an utterance as a public interpretation of one of her thoughts, and the hearer constructing a mental interpretation of this utterance. Nevertheless in developing the notion of conversational implicature Grice drew attention to a fact of fundamental importance: there are aspects of utterance interpretation which cannot be explained in terms of decoding messages according to a set of linguistic rules. Sperber and Wilson argue that an account of utterance interpretation must be based on a general cognitive theory of information processing.
