Introduction

The major goal of this paper is to demonstrate that recovering the speaker-intended meaning may involve not only resolving semantic underdeterminacies but also dealing with indeterminacies of the utterance and to argue that underdeterminacy and indeterminacy of meaning should be treated as distinct pragmatic phenomena. Most pragmatic models attend to underdeterminacy: it is, in fact, their raison d’être, at the same time neglecting indeterminacy, even though it is also an intrinsic feature of communication. Relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986/95; Wilson and Sperber 2004, 2012) deals with both, highlighting essential differences between the two and offering a homogenous and comprehensive account of what they involve. What is more, it provides a plausible motivation for their role in human communication. Concentrating on indeterminacy, this paper examines the nature of the underlying speaker’s intentions, suggesting that, on the one hand, they set a lower boundary on the level of relevance that the communicator manifestly intends the addressee to expect, and on the other, they encourage the recipient to move beyond what I label the threshold of informativity and seek further cognitive effects to offset the processing effort. These effects, even though encouraged by the communicator, may draw on assumptions departing from those in the speaker’s mind, but are, paradoxically, part and parcel of the communicated content. In this way, as will be pointed out below, indeterminacy – just like underdeterminacy – contributes to efficiency of verbal communication, allowing the speaker to communicate much more than is said and bringing about the cognitive alignment between the interactants.

Semantic underdeterminacy

The realisation that linguistic expressions as used for communicative purposes severely underdetermine speaker-intended, context-dependent, specific meanings has informed research in human communication for several decades now (see, e.g., Atlas 2005; Bach 1994, 2007; Bezuidenhout 1997; Carston 2002a; Ifantidou 2014; Jodłowiec 2015; Jucker et al. 2003; Nerlich and Clark 2001; Recanati 2002a, 2002b, 2004; Searle 1983; Seuren 2009; Sperber and Wilson 1986/95, 2002, 2008; Wilson and Sperber 2004; Vicente and Martínez-Manrique 2005; Žegarac 2006). The sources of underdeterminacy are numerous: apart from being ambiguous and vague, utterances may be conceptually truncated (that is they fail to articulate some conceptually important information), they may contain gradable expressions, whose comprehension depends on standards or comparison classes that may be underspecified, and their illocutionary force may have to be adequately contextually settled (Belleri 2014), to mention just the most obvious aspects of underdeterminacy.