Optionality in Truth-Conditional Pragmatics.

In this paper we challenge the Optionality Criterion that goes with Recanati (2010)'s philosophical position called 'Truth-Conditional Pragmatics' (TCP). According to this criterion, any primary pragmatic process of interpretation other than saturation of context-sensitive expressions is intrinsically optional. This sense of 'optional' opposes a notion of mandatory which is too strict in so far as saturation, the only process considered as obligatory, does not always provide us with minimal propositions. This leads us to reconsider the notion of mandatory and to reformulate the core tenet of TCP in the following way: some primary pragmatic processes of modulation may have an optional demand but this does not avoid that on other occasions the same processes may be mandatorily demanded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]