Abstract

Theory of communication describes communication as speech acts which produce communicative intentions. Grice thinks that it is important for successful communication that the hearer recognizes the speaker's communicative intention. For Relevance Theorists, intention determines truth conditions of utterance content. Meaning determination is an inference process which aims at the articulation of the speaker's intention. It is not just the communicative intention phenomenon which determines meaning; implicatures and explicatures do so, too. Grice distinguishes between the content of "What is said" and "What is implicated". "What is said" is equated with the truth-conditional content of the utterance and with sentence meaning, while "what is implicated" is equated with the pragmatic domain . Relevance Theorists have a different view, according to which linguistic semantics is the output of a modular linguistic decoding system and serves as an input to a pragmatic processor. In this paper, the author will present the distinction between Grice's and Relevance Theorists' determination of the communicative intention and the implicature/explicature distinction