Cancelability and the primary/secondary meaning distinction

Abstract

Among the criteria Grice (Studies in the Way of Words, Harvard University Press, 1989: 39–40) proposed for identifying conversational implicatures, cancelability is unquestionably the most celebrated one and the one that is often used as the main, obvious test for classifying speaker's meaning as implicit. Problems with fitting some rather obstinate examples under the requirement of cancelability have led some critics to proposing amendments to Grice's original formulation of the test (Weiner, Analysis 66: 127–130, 2006; Blome-Tillmann, Analysis 68: 156–160, 2008). The purpose of my contribution to the debate is twofold. First, to demonstrate that, in spite of the recent criticism, Grice's cancelability test remains a reliable and effective criterion. The second objective is to employ the test for the discussion and delimitation of the primary and secondary meanings vis-à-vis the what is said/implicated distinction. The test is implemented in the current paradigm of contextualism, including its arguably most radical variety of Default Semantics which models the main, most salient meaning (called here the primary meaning) as intended by the model speaker and recovered by the model addressee (Jaszczolt, Default Semantics: Foundations of a Compositional Theory of Acts of Communication, Oxford University Press, 2005, Representing Time: An Essay on Temporality as Modality, Oxford University Press, 2009, Semantics and pragmatics: The boundary issue, forthcoming a). On such a construal, cancelability is assessed separately for the domains of primary and secondary meanings, as well as for what is said and what is implicated. The structure of the paper is as follows. Section 1 introduces Grice's criterion of cancelability. Section 2 critically assesses a suggestion proposed recently in the literature that the criterion is defunct, discusses an attempt to save the criterion, and concludes that it is not in need of any amendment, albeit its original formulation by Grice easily yields to misinterpretation. Section 3 adopts the “saved” criterion and applies it to the explicit/implicit distinction. Section 4 follows suit by taking up the issue of cancelation and processing, discussing the question of the stage in the incremental processing at which cancelation occurs. Section 5 is the core part of the paper. It builds on the discussions from the preceding two sections and focuses on cancelability vis-à-vis the primary meaning/secondary meaning distinction, where the distinction is construed as orthogonal to that between the explicit and the implicit content—in agreement with the assumptions of Default Semantics and the requirement of modeling salient, intentional meanings as primary meanings independently of their relation to the structure of the uttered sentence. The conclusions of the paper are then twofold: firstly, they concern the defense of Grice's criterion of cancelability, and secondly, the defense of the distinction between primary and secondary meanings which cuts across that between the explicit and the implicit. The role of the criterion in these two distinctions is assessed.

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