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 Pragmatics Online

Pragmatics Online examines the use and interpretation of language and com-
munication in digitally mediated contexts. It provides insight into how mean-
ing is communicated online, with a focus on how users negotiate and navigate
the constraints and resources of social media sites and other online contexts.
The book introduces key concepts in the study of digital contexts and
online communication, and discusses how these can be understood from the
perspective of pragmatics. Each chapter examines a different topic and
includes an overview of key research alongside original pragmatic analyses of
data. Topics include sharing and liking, emoji and emoticons, memes, and
clickbait. Kate Scott focuses on how ideas and topics from pragmatics can be
applied to mediated contexts, irrespective of the particular media.
The book is an essential guide to the pragmatics of online discourse and
behaviour for students and researchers working in the areas of digital prag-
matics, language and media, and English language, linguistics, and communi-
cation studies.

Kate Scott is a senior lecturer at Kingston University, London (UK). Her

research focuses on cognitive pragmatics, and she has published on the prag-
matics of digitally mediated communication, exploring topics including
hashtags, clickbait, and memes.
Language and Digital Media
Series editors: Carmen Lee and Camilla Vásquez
Series co-creator: David Barton

Language and the study of it are changing rapidly in the age of digital media;
our use of language is gradually shaped by and is in turn shaping new media.
Exploring the interplay between digital media and language in society and
covering a broad selection of research contexts, books in Language and
Digital Media investigate both language online and people’s practices around
it, including how they create and how they use online texts. Each title includes
both an overview discussion of the topic as well as analysis of data. Presenting
rigorous research, yet written in an engaging and accessible manner, the series
is key reading for students and researchers across language, linguistics, com-
munication and media studies.

Language, Creativity and Humour Online

Camilla Vásquez

Pragmatics Online
Kate Scott

Mobile Messaging and Resourcefulness

A Post-Digital Ethnography
Caroline Tagg and Agnieszka Lyons

For more information on any of these and other titles, or to order, please go to
https://www.routledge.com/Language-and-Digital-Media/book-series/LADM
Pragmatics Online

Kate Scott
Cover image: © Getty Images
First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Kate Scott
The right of Kate Scott to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Scott, Kate, 1976- author.
Title: Pragmatics online / Kate Scott.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. | Series:
Language and digital media | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021035539 | ISBN 9781138368415 (hardback) | ISBN
9781138368590 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003254201 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Pragmatics. | Social media--Semiotics. | Communication
and technology. | Interpersonal communication.
Classification: LCC P99.4.P72 S36 2022 | DDC 401/.45--dc23/eng/20211118
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021035539
ISBN: 978-1-138-36841-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-36859-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-25420-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003254201
Typeset in Times New Roman
by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)
 C o n t e n ts

Preface vi
Acknowledgements viii

1 Introducing pragmatics online 1

2 Exploring online contexts 21

3 The pragmatics of sharing online 40

4 The pragmatics of tagging 59

5 Non-verbal communication online 82

6 The pragmatics of memes 108

7 You won’t believe what’s in chapter 7! 127

8 Researching online pragmatics 146

Index 164
 Preface

Technology develops quickly and relentlessly. I wrote the majority of this

book during the Covid-­19 pandemic. During this time, I went from using
video-­conferencing technology once in a while to using it daily as my main
channel of communication. As I went from being a hesitant novice to a con-
fident expert user, it was impossible not to be aware of the shifting digital
landscape around me and the communicative practices that were shifting in
response to this. Users of digitally mediated communication adapt quickly.
Their practices develop in line with the technology. However, this pace of
change poses a challenge to researchers working on online communication. It
is almost impossible to keep up to date with all the possibilities for interacting
and communicating online, and it is easy to feel as though your work will be
out of date before it is even finished.
At its heart, this book is about communication in context. The phenomena
and case studies function to illustrate how we adapt to changing communica-
tive contexts and how we use the resources available to us to communicate.
The approach taken is to think about how technology affects the context in
which communication takes place, and to examine the strategies that users
develop to navigate (and in some cases exploit) this. Even if, by the time you
read this book, the sites discussed have fallen out of favour, you should still be
able to appreciate the connection between the contextual and technological
constraints under which users were operating and the strategies that they
adopted. Even if the online landscape looks very different in ten years’ time,
the brains and cognitive systems that we use when operating the technology
will not have changed very much.
 Preface vii

Many of the examples in this book draw on data from social media sites.
Examples that are not publicly available have been reproduced with permis-
sion. Publicly available examples have been anonymised, except when they
have been posted by public figures, such as politicians and journalists, or
when they were posted on behalf of companies or organisations.
I have followed the convention of referring to the speaker/writer/commu-
nicator as she and the hearer/reader/addressee as he in cases where this clari-
fies meaning and helps the reader to assign reference. No further meaning
should be inferred from this use of pronouns.
 A ckn owledgemen ts

I would like to thank Elsevier for granting me permission to reuse work from
previously published journal articles in this book. Sections from Chapter 3
are reprinted from Journal of Pragmatics, 184, Scott K., The pragmatics of
rebroadcasting content on Twitter: How is retweeting relevant?, pp. 52-­60.
Copyright (2021). Sections from Chapter 4 are reprinted from Journal of
Pragmatics, 81, Scott, K., The pragmatics of hashtags: Inference and conver-
sational style on Twitter, pp. 8-­20, Copyright (2015), and from Discourse,
Context and Media 22, Scott, K., ‘Hashtags work everywhere”: The prag-
matic functions of spoken hashtags, pp. 57-­64, Copyright (2018). Sections
from Chapter 7 are reprinted from Journal of Pragmatics, 175, Scott, K., You
won't believe what's in this paper! Clickbait, relevance and the curiosity gap,
pp. 53-­66, Copyright (2021).
Thank you to Carmen Lee and David Barton for approaching me to write
this book, and to anonymous reviewers for their feedback on early proposals.
Thanks to Carmen Lee and Camilla Vásquez for their comments on the first
draft. All mistakes are, of course, my own. I am grateful to Hannah Rowe and
Eleni Steck at Taylor & Francis for their support, encouragement, and
patience.
I have been lucky enough to work with an amazing group of mentors and
colleagues who have guided and inspired me in my work in pragmatics. There
are too many to mention, but particular thanks go to Robyn Carston, Billy
Clark, Tim Wharton, Dan Sperber, and, of course, Deirdre Wilson. A special
mention must also go to Ryoko Sasamoto for her support, encouragement,
and friendship.
 Acknowledgements ix

I would not have got through the last two years without the fantastic sup-
port of my wonderful Kingston colleagues Fan Carter, Sara Upstone, and
Aybige Yilmaz. Thank you for the happiness! Finally, thank you to Esam
Bakhsh for keeping me sane over the last year. You mean the world to me.
 1
I N T R O D U C I N G P R A G M AT I C S
ONLINE

This book is about digitally mediated communication. However, at its heart,

it is a book about people, and it is about how people use the resources avail-
able to them to communicate with each other. Pragmatics is the field of lin-
guistics that is concerned with how we use language in context. Exploring
language and communication online from a pragmatic perspective, reveals
just how strong our urge to communicate with each other is, and how resource-
ful we are when it comes to achieving this. As we shall see over the course of
the book, online contexts differ from offline contexts in important ways, and,
indeed, online contexts differ from one another in various ways too. However,
communicative acts are performed by human beings, and the underlying
mechanisms that drive the production and interpretation of those communi-
cative acts are the same online, as they are offline. As Locher (2010) puts it,
‘online communication is as real as offline interaction’. While new technolo-
gies may offer new opportunities and new resources, they are only as effective
as the people who use them. There is no reason to believe that our basic
human abilities and behaviours change when we go online. Many of the anal-
yses and discussions in this book have arisen from the assumption that we
expect to find the same general processes at work whether we are communi-
cating online or offline.
The focus of this book is digital online technologies. However, humans
have used technology to mediate communication throughout history. Whether

DOI: 10.4324/9781003254201-1
2 INTRODUCING PRAGMATICS ONLINE

it be the telegraph, the printing press, or simple writing instruments, communi-

cative technologies have always affected the context in which communication
takes place. As humans, we have been adapting our communicative strategies
to the available technologies for as long as those technologies have existed. The
differences in the way we interact online and offline must be understood in
relation to the context in which the communication is taking place.
Pragmatic theories, frameworks, and analyses which take contextual fac-
tors into account are crucial in understanding this aspect of communication,
and they are at the core of the discussions in this book. In this first chapter,
we introduce the general field of pragmatics, including some key terms, ideas,
and theories that will be used in the rest of the book. Then we look more
closely at digitally mediated communication, and we will start to think about
the ways in which it is different to face-­to-­face communication. A range of
characteristics will be introduced to help us to grasp the differences between
different platforms, and between online and offline communication. These
discussions introduce key themes and they will provide us with the building
blocks and the vocabulary for the more detailed analyses in later chapters.

PRAGMATICS AND PRAGMATIC THEORIES

Communication is context-­sensitive. When we communicate with others, the
interpretation of our messages almost always depends on the context in which
those messages are produced and understood. This is the case whether we are
communicating face-­to-­face or at a distance, and whether we are using spoken,
signed, or written forms of language. It is also the case when we communicate
non-­verbally via gestures, facial expressions, or body language. To understand
what someone means by what they say, we must consider the context in which
the utterance has been produced and the intentions of the person who has pro-
duced it. To do this we draw on a range of information. We might draw on
information from the physical environment to work out who or what someone is
talking about. We might use information from the prior discourse to help us to
disambiguate a word or phrase. We might use information that we gather from
the speaker’s facial expressions or tone of voice to decide whether someone is
asking us something or telling us something. In each of these cases, we use infor-
mation from the context to help us work out what the speaker was intending to
communicate. These processes are the focus of pragmatics, and the goal of prag-
matics is to understand and explain how we communicate in context.
Those working in pragmatics are traditionally interested in those parts of
language which are context-­sensitive. They might, for example, study deictic
expressions which cannot be fully interpreted without reference to the con-
text. Another major branch of pragmatics is concerned with the study of
what speakers implicate by their utterances, and many scholars study how
non-­literal uses of language, such as metaphor and irony, can be used to con-
vey meaning. When we communicate we do not only transfer factual informa-
tion. We also interact with others in a social context. We use the words that we
 INTRODUCING PRAGMATICS ONLINE 3

say to perform speech acts. We promise, persuade, beg, assert, question, and
warn, and we also tailor our utterances to the social context in terms of how
direct, indirect, or polite we choose to be. All of these tasks fall under the
umbrella of pragmatics.
Pragmatics is a broad discipline, and it encompasses a range of approaches
to the study of language and communication in context (Mey 2001; Verschueren
2009; Locher and Graham 2010; Chapman 2011; Kecskes 2014). Much of the
existing work on the pragmatics of online communication has focused on
socio-­cultural factors and on the participatory practices that take place online.
This research has revealed a wealth of insights into how users’ manage interac-
tions, relationships, and audiences online, how they construct and perform
identities in mediated contexts, and how they navigate multi-­lingual and multi-­
cultural discourse contexts. Work in these areas often overlaps with sociolin-
guistics, conversational analysis, and discourse analysis. I will make reference
to some of this work in the discussions that follow throughout this book, and
we will see how users employ digital resources for relational and (im)politeness
purposes (for example Darics 2010; Langlotz and Locher 2012; Arendholz
2013; Rudolf von Rohr and Locher 2020), how they construct identities online
(for example Zhao et al. 2008; Skovholt et al. 2014), and how they signal affili-
ation and group membership (for example Zappavigna 2012, 2018; Miltner
and Highfield 2017). This remains a fruitful area for research, and as technolo-
gies develop and online practices evolve, the possibilities for future work in
interpersonal and intercultural pragmatics continue to grow.
The discussions in this book, however, will take a broadly theoretical
approach to pragmatics, and the main focus will be on how we can under-
stand the communicative behaviour that we find online in terms of a general
theory of communication and pragmatics. As Chapman (2011: 8) explains,
theoretical pragmatics is concerned with ‘the question of how meaning can in
general be communicated … given the finite resources of a language and the
vagaries of context’. As we shall see in the second half of this chapter and in
Chapter 2, we often have different resources available to us when we commu-
nicate online, and digitally mediated contexts can be vague and unpredictable
in new and interesting ways. This makes digitally mediated communication an
exciting area for analyses and discussions from the perspective of theoretical
pragmatics. In the rest of this chapter, I set the scene for these discussions and
analyses. I begin with a brief overview of two key theoretical frameworks in
pragmatics: speech act theory and relevance theory. The concepts, definitions,
and principles assumed by these theories will form the basis of many of the
analyses and discussions that follow in later chapters.

Speech act theory

Speech act theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1965, 1969) emerged as a way to
understand and analyse the things we do when we speak. As we saw above,
we can do a range of different things when we use language. We can make
4 INTRODUCING PRAGMATICS ONLINE

statements and assert facts, but we can also ask questions, make requests,
give warnings, and issue commands, amongst various other things.
Understanding the type of act that a speaker is performing is a key part of a
hearer’s task when interpreting an utterance. If, for example, a hearer inter-
prets an utterance as a suggestion when it was intended as a command, we
have a case of misunderstanding.
Work in speech act theory has aimed to classify different speech acts and
to describe the conditions under which they may be successfully performed.
According to Arielli (2018), we can understand the things we do online in the
same way that we can understand the things that we do with words. A status
update, he claims, is an assertion, an act of liking is an expressive, and a friend
request is a directive. That is, these different online acts are, according to
Arielli, also different types of speech act.
A key contribution of speech act theory is the observation that, not only
can we do different things with words, but we perform different kinds of acts
every time we speak. Austin (1962) proposed a distinction between locution-
ary acts, illocutionary acts, and perlocutionary acts. A locutionary act is the
act of producing the utterance itself. It is the act of making the sounds or
producing the written marks. An illocutionary act is the type of act that the
utterance performs. A request is a different illocutionary act to a command,
for example, and a promise is a different illocutionary act to a dare. Most of
the work in speech act theory has been focused on the study of illocutionary
acts and the illocutionary force that utterances carry. Finally, an utterance
may perform a perlocutionary act. Perlocutionary acts are the effects that the
utterance has on the hearer. So, for example, a command might have the effect
of scaring the hearer, or a joke might make the hearer laugh. Illocutionary
acts are part of the speaker’s intended meaning, but perlocutionary acts may
be intended or unintended.

Relevance theory
Relevance theory is a cognitive framework for understanding human cogni-
tion and communication (Sperber and Wilson 1986/95; Carston 2002; Wilson
and Sperber 2012; Clark 2013). It is based on two key principles: the cognitive
principle of relevance and the communicative principle of relevance. The cog-
nitive principle of relevance states that human cognition is geared towards the
maximisation of relevance. That is, we naturally pay attention to inputs and
stimuli which we judge as likely to be relevant to us. Something is relevant to
us if it leads to what are known as cognitive effects. Cognitive effects can be
thought of as updates to the way we think about the world, or as changes to
the assumptions that we hold. New information can change these assump-
tions, and if it does, then we say that the new information is relevant.
As we move around the world we hold assumptions about the way things
are. For example, as I write this, I hold various assumptions, including those
in (1) to (3).
 INTRODUCING PRAGMATICS ONLINE 5

(1) It is Monday today.

(2) I have four eggs in my fridge.

(3) If it rains tomorrow, I will not have to water the garden.

New information is relevant if it interacts with the assumptions that we hold

in one of three ways. First it might strengthen an assumption that we already
hold. If I open my fridge and see four eggs in the carton, this visual informa-
tion will strengthen my assumption that I have four eggs left in my fridge. If,
on the other hand, I look in my fridge and see an empty egg carton, this new
information will contradict and eliminate my previous assumption.
Contradicting and eliminating an assumption is the second type of cognitive
effect. The final type of cognitive effect is a contextual implication. This
results when a new piece of information combines with an existing assump-
tion to yield a new implication. For example, if I get up tomorrow and see
that it has been raining, this information will combine with the assumption in
(3) to yield the implication in (4).

(4) I will not have to water the garden.

The more cognitive effects that follow from an input, the more relevant that
input is. However, processing new information requires effort. The relevance
of an input is also affected by the amount of effort that is required to process
it. The more effort required to process an input, the less relevant that input
will be. The relevance of an input is determined by (a) cognitive effects, and
(b) processing effort.
The relevance of a stimulus must be assessed relative to the context in which
it is interpreted. We can think about context from various perspectives. We can
think of it in physical terms as the place in which an utterance takes place. We
can think of it in textual terms as the things that have been mentioned in the
discourse up until that point. However, in the relevance-­theoretic pragmatic
framework, context is a psychological construct. It is the set of assumptions
that the hearer holds and which he will use in his interpretation of the stimulus.1
The information that it has been raining is relevant to me in the example above
because it has been processed in a context that includes the assumption in (3).
The same information might be completely irrelevant on a different occasion if
it does not interact with assumptions in any way to yield cognitive effects. That
is, if nothing follows from the fact that it is raining, the fact that it is raining is
not relevant to me in that context.
Now that we can define relevance and context in this more precise manner,
we can turn to the role that they play in communication. As we move around
the world, we look for relevance, and we hope for relevance. However, it is
only when someone openly and intentionally communicates with us that we
can expect relevance. Intentional and overt acts of communication are what is
6 INTRODUCING PRAGMATICS ONLINE

known as ostensive acts of communication. Relevance theory can be particu-

larly useful for the analysis of online communication because it is a theory of
pragmatics that deals not just with utterances, but with all ostensive acts of
communication. According to relevance theory, ostensive acts are special.
This is captured in the communicative principle of relevance which states that
‘every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its
own optimal relevance’ (Sperber and Wilson 1986/95: 266–267). An ostensive
stimulus will be optimally relevant if it satisfies both of the requirements of
the definition of optimal relevance, as given in (5).

(5) (a) The ostensive stimulus is relevant enough for it to be worth the
addressee’s effort to process it.

(b) The ostensive stimulus is the most relevant one compatible with the
communicator’s abilities and preferences.

What this means is that the addressee of an utterance, or any other ostensive
stimulus, can presume that the communicator was aiming to make her utter-
ance optimally relevant. The addressee can use this presumption in his inter-
pretation. Based on clause (a), the addressee can assume that the utterance will
be worth his while to process, and this leads him to the assumption that the
speaker will not have put him to any gratuitous effort. In practical terms, this
means that if a speaker produces a long-­winded, detailed, or indirect utter-
ance, the hearer will assume that she has done so for a reason, and will look for
extra effects to justify the extra processing effort that has been demanded of
him. Clause (b) sets the upper limit on what a hearer can expect. A hearer can
only expect a speaker to produce an utterance that is compatible with her abili-
ties and with her preferences. That is, a hearer cannot expect a speaker to say
something that she does not want to say or that she is not able to say, even if it
would be more relevant to the hearer if she were to do so. The addressee of an
utterance will use these assumptions in his interpretation, and they lead us to
the relevance-­theoretic comprehension procedure, as given in (6).

(6) Follow a path of least effort in deriving cognitive effects: test interpretive
hypotheses (reference assignments, disambiguations, implicatures, etc.)
in order of accessibility.
Stop when your expectations of relevance are satisfied (or abandoned)
(Wilson and Sperber 2004: 613).

This comprehension procedure falls out naturally from the communicative

principle of relevance and the definition of optimal relevance.
To assess the relevance of an utterance, a hearer must form a hypothesis
about the speaker’s overall intended meaning. This is everything that the
speaker intended to communicate to her addressee when she produced the
utterance. Part of her overall intended meaning will come from what she
 INTRODUCING PRAGMATICS ONLINE 7

states or asserts. This is known as her explicitly communicated meaning.

However, her overall intended meaning also includes anything that she inten-
tionally implies or implicates. This is referred to as implicitly communicated
meaning. According to relevance theory, inference is involved in constructing
hypotheses about both aspects of a speaker’s meaning, and both are therefore
of interest from a pragmatic perspective. We consider these in more detail in
the next section.

UNDERSTANDING SPEAKER'S MEANING

To work out what a speaker intends to communicate, a hearer must form a
hypothesis about her overall intended meaning. This will include her explic-
itly communicated meaning and her implicitly communicated meaning. In
this section, we look at the inferential processes that play a part in the utter-
ance interpretation process, and we assume three levels of meaning: a basic-­
level explicature (or proposition expressed), higher-­level explicatures, and
implicatures. We consider each in turn, and focus on the role that inference
plays in deriving each.

The proposition expressed

What a speaker means when she produces an utterance in context is, in almost
all cases, much more specific and precise than the meaning that is encoded by
the words and structures that make up the sentence itself. Consider the exam-
ple in (7).

(7) He sleeps with his bat by his bed.

Without access to the context in which it is spoken, it is impossible to know

precisely what the speaker of (7) intended to communicate, even at a fairly
basic level. Most approaches to pragmatics acknowledge a level of meaning
that corresponds to the basic statement that the speaker has asserted. This is
variously referred to as ‘what is said’, ‘the basic explicature’, or ‘the proposi-
tion expressed’. This is the aspect of the speaker’s meaning that we would
generally consider to be truth evaluable. That is, we can determine whether
what the speaker has said is true or false by comparing the proposition that
has been expressed with the state of affairs in the world.
Part of the hearer’s job when interpreting an utterance is to form a
hypothesis about the proposition that the speaker has intended to express.
The addressee of (7) will need to perform at least two pragmatic processes
before he will be able to form such a hypothesis. He will have to decide who
the pronoun he refers to. If it refers to one particular person, let us call him
John, then it expresses one proposition. However, if it refers to a different
person, let us call that person Ramy, then it expresses a different proposition.
In the first case, it is a statement about John, and in the second, it is a
8 INTRODUCING PRAGMATICS ONLINE

statement about Ramy. Whether these statements are true or false will
depend on different things. We say they have different truth conditions. How
we assign reference to pronouns such as he and to other referring expressions
directly affects the truth conditions, and hence the proposition that is
expressed by the utterance.
The sentence in (7) also contains the lexically ambiguous word bat. To
interpret the utterance the hearer must decide which of (at least) two mean-
ings the speaker intended. Does the person referred to in the utterance sleep
with an animal by his bed, or does he sleep with a piece of sporting equipment
designed for hitting balls by his bed? Once again, the two meanings have dif-
ferent truth conditions, and we do not know what the explicit meaning of the
utterance is until we choose between them. Reference assignment and disam-
biguation are two key issues in pragmatics. However, often we have to do even
more pragmatic work to reach the meaning that was intended by the speaker.
Consider the exchange in (8).

(8) Jasmine: I’ve stubbed my toe!

Pippa: Stop fussing! You’re not going to die.

Think about the proposition that Pippa is expressing in the second half of her
utterance in (8). It seems fairly clear that she is not telling Jasmine that she
should stop fussing because she is immortal. Rather she is telling her that she
is not going to die right now from this particular incident. To understand
Pippa’s utterance we must go beyond the (even disambiguated) words and
enrich the proposition expressed to something like (9).

(9) You’re not going to die right now from stubbing your toe.

The enrichment in (9) is highly context-­dependent. If we put the same uttered

words in a different context, they are likely to lead to a different explicit
meaning.
Disambiguation, reference assignment, and enrichment are all inferential
processes, and so our pragmatic processing systems are involved in the deriva-
tion of the proposition expressed.

Higher-level explicatures
As we saw above, speakers can perform a range of different speech acts when
they produce utterances. Speech act information can be captured via what are
known as higher-­level explicatures. The proposition expressed is the basic-­
level explicature of an utterance, and indeed, is often referred to as just the
explicature. However, this basic explicature can then be embedded within a
higher-­level explicature which may include information about the speech act
that the speaker is performing. For example, imagine that Sylvia produces the
 INTRODUCING PRAGMATICS ONLINE 9

utterance in (10), intended as a promise. We can represent the speech act that
she is performing as the higher-­level explicature in (11).

(10) There will be cake at the party.

(11) Sylvia promises that [there will be cake at the party].

Higher-­level explicatures also capture information about the attitudes and

emotions of the speaker towards the explicature that she has communicated.
Imagine that the example in (12) is uttered by Antonia.

(12) Sadly, there won’t be any cake.

The truth-­evaluable proposition that Antonia has expressed is given in (13).

However, the higher-­level explicature in (14) is also part of her intended
meaning.

(13) There won’t be any cake.

(14) Antonia is sad that [there won’t be any cake].

We cannot say that we have fully understood a speaker’s message if we have

not correctly understood the attitudes and emotions that the speaker intends
to convey. In example (12), the propositional attitude information has been
communicated via the use of the word sadly. However, the speaker could have
conveyed the same information via facial expressions and/or tone of voice.
Both speech act information and propositional attitude information are
understood as part of what is explicitly communicated (hence higher-­level
explicatures), rather than what is implicitly communicated. This is because
they are a development of the basic-­level explicature. They have truth condi-
tions in their own right which are independent from the truth conditions of
the basic-­level explicature communicated by the utterance. Both the basic-­
level explicature and higher-­ level explicatures can combine with existing
assumptions to yield implicatures. We turn our attention to implicitly com-
municated meaning next.

Implicitly communicated meaning

Even after we have disambiguated, assigned reference, and performed any
other context-­specific processes of enrichment to derive the explicit meaning,
we may not have fully understood the speaker’s overall intended meaning.
Speakers often use their utterances to imply or implicate meaning that goes
beyond the words. Consider the utterance in (7) again, but this time as the
answer to a question, as in (15).
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