KENT BACHYOU DON’T SAY?ABSTRACT. This paper defends a purely semantic notion of what is said against variousrecent objections. The objections each cite some sort of linguistic, psychological, or epi-stemological fact that is supposed to show that on any viable notion of what a speaker saysin uttering a sentence, there is pragmatic intrusion into what is said. Relying on a modifiedversion of Grice’s notion, on which what is said must be a projection of the syntax ofthe uttered sentence, I argue that a purely semantic notion is needed to account for thelinguistically determined input to the hearer’s inference to what, if anything, the speakerintends to be conveying in uttering the sentence.In the course of introducing his theory of conversational implicature, Griceadopted a notion of what is said with which to contrast what a speakerimplicates in uttering a sentence. He imposed the Syntactic Correlationconstraint, as I call it, according to which what is said must correspond to“the elements of [the sentence], their order, and their syntactic character”(1989, 87). So if any element of the content of an utterance, i.e., of whatthe speaker intends to convey, does not correspond to any element of thesentence being uttered, it is not part of what is said.How could anyone object to the Syntactic Correlation constraint? Itmight seem that this constraint limits what is said to the context-invariantcontent of an utterance, but Grice explicitly allowed for indexicality andambiguity. Even though the referent of an indexical element varies fromcontext to context, it still corresponds (relative to the context) to that ele-ment. And even if the uttered sentence is ambiguous, either because itcontains ambiguous expressions or is structurally ambiguous, the mean-ing that is operative in a given context is still a projection of the syntaxof the sentence as used in that context. Nevertheless, recent critics havecontended that a syntactically constrained notion of what is said is theor-etically useless and empirically unmotivated. One common reason for thiscontention is that many sentences are semantically incomplete or under-determinate – they fail to express a complete and determinate propositioneven after any indexical references are assigned and any ambiguities areresolved – in which case nothing is said in the utterance of such a sentence.Another common reason is that many semantically complete sentencesintuitively do not express, and typically are not used to convey, the pro-position which, by Syntactic Correlation, comprises what is said. A thirdreason is that what is said (according to Syntactic Correlation) gener-Synthese 128: 15–44, 2001.© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.16 KENT BACHally plays no role in the pragmatic processes involved in understandingutterances.I will argue that a syntactically constrained notion of what is said doeshave a legitimate theoretical role to play and is empirically significant.In order to show this, I will first (in Section 1) suggest several simplerefinements to Grice’s original notion. Then (in Section 2) I will explainwhat I take to be right and what I take to be wrong with Grice’s dis-tinction between what is said and what is implicated. This distinction isnot exhaustive, for it neglects the phenomenon of conversational implicit-ure (that’s implic-i-ture, as opposed to implic-a-ture), but taking that intoaccount requires merely refining his distinction.It has been objected that this distinction, however refined, is ultimatelymisguided, in that the notion of what is said is inherently pragmatic, justlike implicature. This objection has been based on arguments that takeroughly the following form:1. Any sentence can be used to communicate something without implic-ating it.2. If an utterance of a given sentence communicates a proposition that itdoesn’t implicate, then that proposition is what is said in the utteranceof that sentence.3. Even so, the determination of that proposition is bound up in pragmat-ics.4. Therefore, what is said is not a purely semantic matter.Bad argument. Aside from mistakenly assuming that the distinctionbetween what is said and what is implicated is exhaustive, this form ofargument relies on an overly expansive conception of what is said. Therationale for this conception derives mainly from certain psychologicaland epistemological considerations involving “pragmatic” processes and“semantic” intuitions. I will argue (in Section 3) that such considerationsare misdirected and do not undermine a syntactically constrained, purelysemantic notion of what is said.As I will explain in Section 4, this overly expansive conception of whatis said can seem attractive only insofar as one ignores certain distinctions,each between something semantic and something pragmatic. Once thesedistinctions are recognized, there is no reason to reject a purely semanticnotion of what is said. However, the situation is not as clear-cut as thesedistinctions might suggest, inasmuch as there are open linguistic questionsthat remain to be addressed. In Section 5, I will raise a few such ques-tions and present a sample of linguistic phenomena that pose legitimateproblems for how to draw the line between what is said and what is not.YOU DON’T SAY? 171. REFINING THE NOTION OF WHAT IS SAIDIn contrasting saying with implicating, Grice took our “intuitive under-standing of the meaning of say” (pp. 24–5) to comport with SyntacticCorrelation, which requires that what is said correspond to “the elements of[the sentence], their order, and their syntactic character”. His use of ‘order’and ‘syntactic character’ suggest some sort of compositional principle,such that what is said is determined by the contents of the constituents(‘elements’) of the sentence as a function of their syntactic relation-ships. And considering that a sentence can include unpronounced elements(Grice did not consider this), such as empty categories, implicit arguments,and syntactic ellipses, Syntactic Correlation should not be construed as re-quiring that every element of what is said corresponds to an uttered elementof the uttered sentence. But it does require that every element of what issaid correspond to some element of the uttered sentence.1There was one respect in which Grice’s favored sense of ‘say’ was abit stipulative. For him saying something entails meaning it. This is whyhe used the locution ‘making