1 Pragmatic Compositionality, Syntactic Direction Principle, and the Contextualism/Minimalism Debate

The aims of this paper are twofold: to present an argument in favour of a version of the contextualist account of meaning which is free from the syntactic constraint of the development of the logical form of the sentence (called here the Syntactic Direction Principle) and demonstrating that contextualism can be made compatible with semantic minimalism. First, I present the case for replacing the (i) explicit/implicit (said/implicated) distinction with a (ii) cognitively based distinction between primary and secondary meanings, orthogonal to the distinctions in (i). Next, I present how this distinction can be implemented in a contextualist, ‘syntactic constraint free ’ account of Default Semantics (Jaszczolt 2005, 2009, forthcoming). The second aim is centred around the idea that contextualist accounts that adhere to the Syntactic Direction are ‘minimalist at heart ’ in trying to depict intuitive utterance content and the syntactically triggered content at the same time, conflating both to a theoretical construct which does no good service for either aim in that it sits mid-way between minimal content and the intended, intuitive, primary content. It is concluded that contextualism has to exorcise the syntactic constraint in order to realise the professed objectives