Non Intentional Meanings: From Exclusion to Inclusion

Abstract

Gricean pragmatics is one of the mainstreams in philosophy of language and linguistics. It has been instrumental in fully understanding fundamental aspects of intentional communication. However, this theoretical tradition has not been especially concerned with the transmission and recognition of unintentional meanings, for example meanings evoked by Freudian slips, unintended puns, and slips of the tongue. Here I aim at showing that the study of such unintentional meanings is relevant for a general theory of utterance production and utterance comprehension. Neurocognitive linguistics (Lamb 1999, 2004 and 2013) has approached those unintentional meanings and has explained how the linguistic system of speaker or a hearer is organized and how it works, and it also figures as an interesting complement of pragmatics.