Recanati argues against the traditional understanding of the semantics/pragmatics divide. Through half a dozen case studies, he shows that 'pragmatic modulation' interacts with the grammar-driven process of semantic composition. As a result, what an utterance says cannot be neatly separated from what the speaker means.

François Recanati has been a research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris since 1979. He is the author of Perspectival Thought (OUP, 2007) and various other publications in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind.

• Introduction


• 1: Compositionality, Flexibility, and Context-Dependence


• 2: Adjectives: A Case Study


• 3: Weather Reports


• 4: Pragmatics and Logical Form


• 5: Embedded Implicatures


• 6: Indexicality and Context-Shift


• 7: Open Quotation


• 8: Open Quotation Revisited


• References