On weak communication

Abstract

Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson suggest that much of linguistic communication is weak because the hearer usually must take a great responsibility in the interpretation of the speaker’s utterance. Sometimes, the (very) “weak implicatures” supplied by the hearer are very different from (and even incompatible with) the speaker’s intention. Relevance Theory helps us to understand crucial aspects of weak communication. However, I aim at showing that pragmatic theory should reconsider the importance of intention in order to explain that, often, the hearer interprets certain meanings that are independent from (or even incompatible with) the speaker’s intention. Some types of inferences proposed by Mira Ariel, as well as unintended puns studied by Sydney Lamb and other stratificational linguists, help us to begin to show that it may be necessary to go beyond the concept of intention if we want to understand why and how human communication is weak.