Simple sentences, substitution and embedding explicatures (the case of implicit indirect reports)

pp. 321-361

in: Alessandro Capone, The pragmatics of indirect reports, Berlin, Springer, 2016

Abstract

In this chapter, I am going to discuss a very interesting case brought to our attention by Saul (Analysis 57:102–108, 1997, Simple sentences, substitution, and intuitions. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007) and references therein: NP-related substitution failure in simple sentences. Whereas it is well known that opacity occurs in intensional contexts and that in such contexts it is not licit to replace an NP with a co-referential one (this would be illicit, substitution failure constituting a violation of the compositionality constraint, according to Salmon (Frege's puzzle. The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1986, Content, cognition and communication. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007), Richard (Context and the attitudes. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013), and Jaszczolt (Default semantics: foundations of a compositional theory of acts of communication. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005)), one would not expect that substitution failure (that is an exception to Leibniz's law) should also be exhibited by simple sentences (though they are not exhibited by all simple sentences) in the context of stories about Superman. The suggested explanation of these cases is to posit an embedding explicature, that is to say the insertion of structure (a sentential fragment such as "We are told that" or "As the story goes") that ipso facto creates an intensional context capable of blocking substitution. I consider various complications to this story in the light of important objections by García-Carpintero (p.c.) and, finally, I consider how this story fares when one applies constraints on explicatures along the lines of those proposed by Hall (Int Rev Pragmatics 6(1):1–28, 2014) in an interesting paper.