A bedrock principle in pragmatics is that the linguistic signals produced by speakers generally underdetermine the meanings that are communicated to interpreters. For Grice, for instance, utterance meaning lies close to what is overtly encoded, allowing only for the resolution of indexicals, tense, reference, and ambiguity. Lepore and Stone (L&S) agree, but with a stunning twist: they analyze all extrasemantic content as being derived from ambiguity resolution, leaving no work for Gricean tools. Despite significant areas of concurrence with L&S, we ultimately find their analysis to be untenable. To establish this, we focus on a form of pragmatic enrichment that recruits coherence establishment processes to apply within the clause—‘eliciture’—for which we see no credible analysis in terms of ambiguity resolution. We argue that an adequate account of language understanding must recognize the robust roles of both ambiguity resolution and pragmatic enrichment, using tense interpretation as a case study.
