The French Grice: Recanati (An Italian Surname, though)

--- From Kasher, "Implicature" (Routledge).


Recanati, "Truth-Conditional Pragmatics" and "Primary Pragmatic Processes" are excerpts from his book on Direct Reference (Blackwell)

"Recanati
argues that many cases that were analyzed as implicatures
are pragmatic constituents of the proposition expressed.
He rejects the popular view in formal semantics that
"what is said" is derived from "sentence meaning" by
filling in empty slots (such as an appropriate domain of
quantification), on the grounds that there are cases who
cannot be explained in this way. However, it is not at
all clear that the cases he discusses in this context are
not just implicatures and are indeed a part of the
proposition expressed by the sentence. The author
proposes that there are pragmatic processes which operate
locally (below the sentence level) before the computation
of the proposition from word meanings.