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Abstract Abstract: The current research delves into the diachronic transmutation of meaning theories, focusing on the debates between two rival branches of thought in the post-Gricean pragmatics, namely contextualism and semantic minimalism, which both aim at remedying the imperfections of Grice’s theoretical model. The results show that: 1) Pertaining to “what is said” in Gricean sense, contextualism as an expansion view generally enriches its intensions by encompassing partial or whole pragmatic contributions. Contrariwise, semantic minimalism as a reduction view tends to demarcate semantics and pragmatics so as to ensure the independent status of semantics from pragmatics and reconstructs triggering factors of pragmatic intrusions. 2) Concerning the nature of generalized conversational implicatures (GCIs), the two schools also differ in their assessments and have seen to it as either default inference, or contextual relevance or the two in parallel. 3) Regarding the inferential mechanism of pragmatic process, two distinct processes have been formulated to explicate the pragmatic intrusions, namely and top-down, contextually-driven process of free enrichment and the bottom-up, linguistically mandated process of logical development. By reviewing these multiple gradient meaning models, this paper schematizes an up-to-date and precise description of the contemporary landscape of meaning theories, and provides a workable approach to meaning research for both experts and green hands in the hope of promoting its explorations and bringing it to a new frontier in terms of width and depth.
Key words: meaning theories; semantics-pragmatics interface; contextualism; semantic minimalism; post-Gricean pragmatics
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