Contextualism vs minimalism: a debate about the (in)dependence between Semantics and Pragmatics

Abstract

This paper has as its main goal to present the debate between two main opposite theoretical trends: semantic minimalism and semantic contextualism. We shall argue that the core of their dispute is mainly about close relationship between semantics and pragmatics on what concerns the meaning of a sentence and its possible influence of the context of utterance on its understanding. To minimalists Cappelen and Lepore (2005), the meaning of a sentence is largely determined by its grammatical components; according to them, the context of utterance does not influence the semantic content of a sentence, except for the case of indexicals. The contextualists, such as Recanati (2010), on the other hand, argue that the context modalizes the semantic content of a sentence: different meanings may be attributed to the same sentence, depending on the sense of the utterance. The debate between these two distinct approaches seems to allude to how far does semantics depends on pragmatics, whether they are in a relation when it comes to deal with meaning and context. When we take minimalism into account, semantics and pragmatics are separated research areas; however, when we take the contextualist approach, these areas are largely dependent on each other; that is, the truth conditions of a sentence depend on the contextual information about the speech act.