Speech Act Pluralism, Minimal Content and Pragmemes

Abstract

As speech acts in contexts, pragmemes serve to illustrate speech act pluralism. What is less clear is whether they play an important role in determining the primary meanings of sentences. Semantic contextualism is the view according to which word meaning or sentence meaning cannot be detached from some extralinguistic features of their utterance. Semantic minimalism suggests another way of conceiving the relationship between sentence meaning and pragmemes. Some sentence-types may express only “proposition-radicals”, as suggested by Kent Bach. Are there however pragmemes that determine primary sentence meanings and that are not prescribed by the very semantic features of the sentence? Carston and Recanati both argue that there are. However, cancel ability reveals the presence of a minimal accessible content that could be expressed without these additional features. Are there pragmemes determining primary sentence meanings that are not prescribed by semantic features and that are not cancelable? In this paper, I argue that there are no such examples. Pragmemes may contribute to the determination of the content of certain assertions, but they do not contribute to the determination of minimal content of the sentence-types used in these utterances. I conclude that a proper appreciation of the role of pragmemes forces us to accept speech act pluralism and bifurcationism, the idea that there are two levels of content: minimal and maximal. That is, different pragmemes produce different inferential augmentations of a minimal level of linguistic meaning. But this is precisely what semantic minimalism is all about.

I wish to thank Jessica Moore for her translation of some of the parts of this work.