Imagination and Convention

Abstract

Abstract Communication exploits conventional rules, deliberate choices, and many other faculties. How do hearers manage to understand speakers? And how do speakers manage to shape hearers' understanding? A common answer invokes simple meanings and general ways to reinterpret them, as in H. P. Grice's theory of conversational implicature. This book shows that such approaches are unsatisfactory. They fail to account for the linguistic knowledge that goes into resolving speech act ambiguities, placing constraints on context, and articulating the different functions of different parts of utterances. At the same time, they fail to account for the diverse kinds of imaginative engagement hearers bring to figurative and evocative language. This book offers a new account of linguistic knowledge as a specifically social competence for making our ideas public. This view embraces the diverse dimensions of meaning that linguists have discovered, and distinguishes them from the open-ended imaginative engagement involved in appreciating figurative and evocative language. In place of a single semantics–pragmatics divide, the book argues for distinguishing linguistic knowledge, ambiguity resolution, imaginative engagement and psychological understanding. Only ambiguity resolution overlaps with pragmatics, as traditionally understood.

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