Nicolle S, Clark B
Middlesex University, London, UK.
Cognition. 1999 Jan 1;69(3):337-54. doi: 10.1016/s0010-0277(98)00070-5.
Gibbs and Moise [Gibbs, R., Moise, J., 1997. Pragmatics in understanding what is said. Cognition 62, 51-74], present experimental results which, they claim, show that people recognize a distinction between what is said and what is implicated. They also claim that these results provide support for theories of utterance interpretation (such as RELEVANCE Theory) which recognize that pragmatic processes are involved not only in understanding what is implicated but also in working out what is said (the 'explicature'). We attempted to replicate some of these experiments and also adapted them. Our results fail to confirm Gibbs and Moise's claims. Most significantly, they show that, under certain conditions, subjects select implicatures when asked to select the paraphrase that best reflects what a speaker has said. We suggest that our results can be explained within the framework of RELEVANCE Theory (Sperber, D., Wilson, D., 1986.
Communication and Cognition. Blackwell, Oxford) if we assume that subjects select the paraphrase that comes closest to achieving the same set of communicated contextual effects as the original utterance. When an utterance gives rise to a single strong implicature, subjects tend to select this as the paraphrase that best reflects what is said; in other cases (for example in Gibbs and Moise's stimuli) subjects tend to select the explicature.
吉布斯和莫伊斯[吉布斯，R.，莫伊斯，J.，1997年。理解话语含义中的语用学。《认知》62卷，第51 - 74页]展示了他们声称能表明人们认识到话语所说内容与所隐含内容之间区别的实验结果。他们还声称这些结果为话语解释理论（如关联理论）提供了支持，这些理论认识到语用过程不仅涉及理解所隐含的内容，还涉及推断话语所说的内容（“明说的内容”）。我们试图重复其中一些实验并对其进行改编。我们的结果未能证实吉布斯和莫伊斯的说法。最显著的是，结果表明，在某些条件下，当要求受试者选择最能反映说话者所说内容的释义时，他们会选择隐含意义。我们认为，如果我们假设受试者选择的释义最接近实现与原始话语相同的一组交际语境效果，那么我们的结果可以在关联理论框架内（斯珀伯，D.，威尔逊，D.，1986年。《关联性：交际与认知》。布莱克韦尔出版社，牛津）得到解释。当一个话语产生单一强烈的隐含意义时，受试者倾向于选择这个作为最能反映所说内容的释义；在其他情况下（例如在吉布斯和莫伊斯的刺激材料中），受试者倾向于选择明说的内容。
