Pragmatic enrichment

The phrase "pragmatic enrichment" is sometimes used in a broad sense to refer to the process in virtue of which the content conveyed by an utterance comes to include all sorts of elements which are contextually implied without being part of what the utterance literally means. In his class notes "Pragmatic Enrichment : Introduction by Examples," Chris Potts gives examples like the following: (1) John and Mary have recently started going together. Valentino is Mary's ex-boyfriend. One evening, John asks Mary, ―Have you seen Valentino this week?‖ Mary answers, ―Valentino's been sick with mononucleosis for the past two weeks.‖ Valentino has in fact been sick with mononucleosis for the past two weeks, but it is also the case that Mary had a date with Valentino the night before. Mary's utterance clearly suggests a negative (and false) answer to the question : "Have you seen Valentino this week ?" Literally, however, she only says that Valentino has been sick with mononucleosis for the past two weeks, and that is true. In his William James Lectures delivered at Harvard in the late sixties, Grice described the mechanism through which one can mean one thing by saying another (Grice 1989). The term of art coined by Grice for that mechanism is "conversational implicature." Thus, in (1), Mary ‗says' that Valentino has been sick with mononucleosis for the past two weeks, and ‗conversationally implicates' that she has not seen him this week. On Grice's account, implicatures are derived through an inference which enables the interpreter to grasp the speaker's communicative intention despite the fact that it's not articulated in words. The inference makes use of two crucial premisses (in addition to background knowledge): (1) the fact that the speaker has said what she has said (here, that Valentino has been sick etc.), and (2) the fact that the speaker, qua communicator, obeys (or is supposed to obey) the rules of communication or, as Grice puts it, the "maxims of conversation." Because of the role played by the first premiss in the inference through which they are derived, conversational implicatures belong to the ‗post-semantic' layer of interpretation. This means that, in order to derive the implicatures of an utterance, an interpreter must start by identifying what the speaker literally says. (The properly semantic layer of interpretation corresponds to the identification of what is said — the proposition literally expressed.) It is customary in the literature …