ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a picture of linguistic communication that is influenced by Grice’s ideas about speech production and interpretation while rejecting the idealizations connected to his conception of language as cooperative information exchange. The proposed account preserves the general idea that interpretation often involves representing the speaker’s means-end reasoning, but rejects the idea that the audience must assume that the speakers’ goals are cooperative in order to properly interpret them. The chapter defines a general category of meaning, which has two subcategories. The subcategory of overt meaning entails at least some minimal level of cooperation in the sense that the speaker is trying to help the audience identify her communicative intentions, however, acts of overt meaning need not be cooperative beyond this point. The subcategory of covert speaker meaning, in contrast, involves deception; in such cases the speaker intends that her audience fail to recognize what she is up to. In this account, overtness comes in degrees, with purely overt acts of meaning and purely covert acts of meaning serving as the limiting cases. The chapter explores ways in which this proposal is able to overcome problems faced by Grice’s account.
