The "Saying & Meaning and the Semantics/Pragmatics-Distinction" research project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. It is headed by Andreas Graeser and Klaus Petrus and involves four PhD students:

• Sarah-Jane Conrad
• David Lüthi
• Jonas Pfister
• Annina Schneller

Focal issues

The project covers the following central research topics:

• Grice on saying
• Semantics à la Grice
• Semantic and pragmatic interpretation
• Grice's philosophical methodology

With these principal areas of research, the project reacts to a number of issues that formed the centre of controversial discussions in philosophy and linguistics in the 1970s and that have recently met with renewed interest: What exactly is it to say something literally with a sentence? Is literal meaning exhaustively determined by linguistic rules or conventions? Or is what is said rather an aspect of what utterers of the sentence mean?

Background

There seems to be widespread agreement at least with regard to one point: that a most promising approach to the above questions is embodied in Paul Grice's theories of meaning and conversation. The dispute, however, is over the direction in which Grice's ideas should be developed. Thus some appeal to Grice in insisting on a minimalist and therewith purely semantic notion of what is said. Others point to an allegedly Gricean claim that saying is a variety of meaning, and consequently take what is said to be thoroughly pragmatic. Others again start from the concept of interpretation and put the emphasis on the role what is said plays in the pragmatic interpretation of linguistic utterances.

Objective

That adherents of such diverse conceptions of semantics and pragmatics all equally appeal to Grice has to do with the fact that Grice himself only provided sketchy outlines of his undoubtedly original ideas. It is therefore surprising that hardly anyone engaged in the current debate would seem to care for a scrupulous reconstruction of the fundamental concepts of Grice's theories. However, as long as it is unclear how exactly such central notions as that of saying are to be understood, it must also remain an open question in what ways Grice's ideas on meaning, saying and implicating can be exploited for the semantics/pragmatics-distinction.

To clarify this issue is the primary objective of the "Saying & Meaning and the Semantics/Pragmatics-Distinction" research project.