Sens implicite, implicatures et principes d’inférence

Abstract

This paper explores the connection between general pragmatic principles (Cooperation, Relevance). Implicit content is a broad category. Post-Gricean pragmatics has consistently shown that inferences already come into play in order to derive « what is said », or explicatures, rolling back the boundaries of the notion of implicit meaning. I argue that the general pragmatic principles postulated are not unlikely to be honoured in the breach (as in cases of frontal verbal aggression), which compromises their validity. However they can be partly dispensed with if, following Recanati (2004), we assume that an associative, parallel model of processing is sufficient to reconstruct « what is said ». Yet they still need to be invoked minimally to derive a specific class of assumptions presented here, as well as to account for the fact that some general presumption of cooperation or relevance appears to be made by default (with no evidence to the contrary), inviting hearers to provide a modicum of interpretative effort when the meaning of an utterance is not immediately clear.

Keywords

• explicature
• implicature
• “what is said”
• principle of relevance
• cooperative principle