Topics: utterances and propositions; words, concepts and the world; higher-level explicatures; strength of explicatures

Overview

The previous chapter looked at the way in which relevance theory draws the distinction between explicit and implicit communication, and at some of the differing views about how to draw the distinction. This chapter considers some of the properties of explicatures and some of the different kinds of explicatures which might be communicated. First, it considers the proposition expressed by an utterance. This is followed by a discussion of the relationships between words and concepts and between concepts and the world. Within relevance theory, the proposition expressed is the propositional form arrived at by fleshing out a linguistically encoded semantic representation. It is arguably always the case that the lowest-level proposition is embedded under other more complex representations and Section 6.4 looks at these ‘higher-level explicatures’ in more detail. The chapter concludes by considering the extent to which explicatures can vary with regard to the strength with which they are communicated. This includes considering poetic utterances where some of the details of the proposition expressed are not clear.