Prudent semantics meets wanton speech act pluralism

In G. Preyer (ed.), Context-Sensitivity and Semantic Minimalism: New Essays on Semantics and Pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 194--215 (2007)
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Abstract

Ernie Lepore and Herman Cappelen (2005) argue that contextual influences on semantic content are much more restricted than most theorists assume, by presenting three tests for semantic context-sensitivity and concluding that only a very restricted class of expressions pass them. They combine this extreme semantic minimalism with an even more extreme speech-act pluralism, according to which a speaker has said anything that she can be reported as having said. I argue that because Lepore and Cappelen refuse to distinguish what is said from what is claimed, their tests wrongly classify metaphor as semantically context-sensitive. I then argue that our ordinary linguistic practices support a distinction between what is said and what is claimed, and that underwrites a much more moderate form of speech act pluralism.

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Elisabeth Camp
Rutgers - New Brunswick

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