Parallelism and linearity of utterance interpretation: a case study with implicit causality

Within the framework of Relevance Theory, this paper addresses the distinction between explicatures and implicatures through a theoretical case study, where a causal implicature determines the temporal reference of the current utterance, which is generally understood as part of its explicatures. Following the discussions on the explicit-implicit distinction in the recent works of Carston (2002) and Recanati (2002a), we suggest that the distinction between articulated and unarticulated constituents may be more operative when considering the cognitive process of utterance understanding. We assume that these two levels of utterance meaning are recovered through parallel processing with information exchanges.