Reflections on Jennifer Saul's View of Successful Communication and Conversational Implicature

Abstract

Saul (2002) criticizes a view on the relationship between speaker meaning and conversational implicatures according to which speaker meaning is exhaustively comprised of what is said and what is implicated. In the course of making her points, she develops a couple of new notions which she calls “utterer-implicature” and “audience-implicature”. She then makes certain claims about the relationship between the intersection of those two notions and successful communication and also about the difference between conversational implicature and the intersection of utterer and audience implicatures. Finally, she tries to figure out the role and importance of conversational implicature in communication. Her claim on this issue is that conversational implicature plays a normative role in communication. In this paper, I will introduce her views on the above issues and critically engage some of them. I will show that her identification of successful communication with the intersection of utterer and audience implicatures is wrong. I will then show that her views on the difference between conversational implicature and the intersection of utterer and audience implicature run to several problems. Finally, appealing to what she says in Saul (2010) I try to make her claim about the normative character of conversational implicature more accurate.

Keywords

• grice
• conversational implicature
• utterer-implicature
• audience-implicature
• successful communication
• normativity