Decir y no decir: decir sin haber dicho

Abstract

One of the most important contributions to the study of the implicit meaning in communication has been, without a doubt, the one carried out by P. Grice (1975) with his famous "Cooperation principle". From this theoretical frame, this paper analyses certain kinds of utterance that are characterized, at the level of the explicit meaning, by offering an insufficient quantity of information and thus by breaking up with the first Grice's quantity maxim. A double objective is pursued: on the one hand, to study the communicative functionality of such utterances; on the other hand, to distinguish among three different types of utterances depending on the configuration in them of the informativity presence/absence. The analyses are carried out on six examples originating from the electoral campaign of the Spanish general elections of March, 1996.