A pragmatic analysis of tautological utternances

The interpretation of tautological utterances of the form, e.g., if it rains, it rains has generally been characterized in the literature as a case of Gricean conversational implicature (Grice 1975). However, in recent years, this analysis, and indeed the entire Gricean program, has come under attack. Wierzbicka (1987) contends that tautology must be seen as a language-specific, attitudinal phenomenon, thus, in her view, vitiating Grice's universalist approach. In this paper, we take issue with this claim, pointing out certain flaws in Wierzbicka's 'radical semantics' approach to tautology. We then propose a new Gricean account of tautological utterances based upon a large corpus of naturally occurring data.