Literalist approaches: the neo-Griceans

Neo-Gricean work on pragmatic meaning has been concentrated on two key meaning representations: what is said and generalized conversational implicatures. This has resulted in two key lines of work amongst neo-Griceans. The first line of work has focused on the generally accepted problem of linguistic under-determinacy, namely, that Grice’s notion of what is said does not in fact match with what we intuitively understand as said2 (i.e. what is taken to be said; or what is taken to be meant by what someone has said). The second line of work in neo-Gricean pragmatics has focused on the claim that there is an intermediate layer of meaning that relies on the general expectations of speakers of a language about what particular expressions are taken to mean. Within this intermediate layer of presumptive meaning, it is the notion of generalized conversational implicature that has received the most attention from neo-Griceans, although the role of formulaic language more generally, in relation to speaker meaning, has been considered in passing.