The reliability of Kent Bach’s Indirect Quotation test

Bach (1999) argues that the conventional type of implicature is a theoretical artifact of linguistic and philosophical semantics. If it is removed, the distinction between semantic and pragmatic meaning becomes clearer and, in this sense, the specifications of ‘what is said’ can be straightforwardly determined; and the so-called ‘indirect quotation (IQ)’ test proves purposeful to this end. In fact, an utterance’s semantic content can be determined subject to successful application of the IQ test to the utterance. The current presentation aims to unveil the problems besetting the reliability of Bach’s IQ method from the point of view of connectives, particularly because.