ABSTRACT
Approaching pragmatics as the study of meanings that are inferred but not stated, this is the longest chapter in Doing Pragmatics. It covers Gricean pragmatics and neo-Gricean pragmatics (particularly the work of Horn and of Levinson) in a single section. This section shows how Grice’s maxims, which are illustrated with striking real world examples, were subsumed within principles that achieve an economy of theory by neo-Griceans, at the same time avoiding the need for troubling notions such as flouts and violations. The section on relevance theory is greatly expanded in this edition and includes discussions of ostension, contextual assumptions and procedural and conceptual meaning as well as explanations and illustrations of the role of explicature, higher-level explicature and implicature in helping hearers to determine the optimal relevance of utterances. In the final section, the central role of implicature and inference in pragmatics is discussed, together with the role of inference in historical pragmatics and the relative balance between the responsibility of the speaker and the role of the hearer in ensuring optimally relevant communication. The final section also looks beyond utterance interpretation to lexical interpretation, the subject of Chapter 4, and to the role of inference in interaction.
