Abstract

For more than twenty years Kent Bach and François Recanati have discussed their different conceptions of what is said. The aim of this paper is to compare their standpoints, particularly with regard to the aspects of conventionality, context-dependence and propositionality. It turns out that Bach's semantic conception of what is said seems to be the more compelling one because it copes with all communicative situations and does not depend on seemingly semantic intuitions which would undermine its 'objectivity'. At the same time, his semantic conception still upholds the traditional semantics-pragmatics distinction. Nonetheless, there remain problems like the distinction between implic-a-tures and implic-i-tures that challenge Bach's conception. Therefore, I suggest two criteria to differentiate between implicatures and expansions, respectively between implicatures and completions.