Join us this Friday, January 22nd for TiL’s first talk of the semester: a talk by Marina Terkourafi from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Her talk is entitled, “What is said from different points of view” and will take place in 1750 University Hall (601 South Morgan Street 60607) at 3 PM.

Marina Terkourafi (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
What is said from different points of view

What is said as a theoretical notion was first proposed by Paul Grice in his William James lectures as a way of drawing the line between what a hearer would know upon hearing an utterance based on her knowledge of the language, and what she could further infer based on the fact that an utterance had been uttered in context. Understood as a distinction between truth-conditional and non truth-conditional content, the distinction between ‘what is said’ and ‘what is implicated’ has met with increasing skepticism over the years and with reactions ranging from reformulation (Bach 2001, Camp 2006) to rejection (Carston 1999, Jaszczolt 2005). In this talk, I go over theoretical and empirical arguments that support the need for a neo-Gricean, minimal notion of ‘what is said’.