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Yoon, YoungEun. 2012. Pragmatic Minimalism vs. Maximalism: A Reply to Hansen (2008). Korean Journal of Linguistics, 37-1, 179-198. Bach (2001, 2005) argues for a clear division between semantics and pragmatics. In the same vein, he proposes that the so-called minimal notion of ‘what is said’ is available to language users. On the other hand, Recanati (2001, 2004) argues that the minimal notion of what is said, i.e., the so-called minimal proposition, is not what the sentence says and has no position in the actual process of understanding the utterance. That is, the semantically underdetermined literal meaning cannot be available to language users at any point in communication. In this context, Hansen (2008) claims that if real-life data such as courtroom conversations are taken into consideration, the literal meanings of utterances are revealed to be available to ‘non-linguistically trained’ ordinary language users. Given all these, this paper revisits the two contrasting views on ‘what is said,’ i.e., pragmatic minimalism and maximalism, dubbed by Recanati (2001), and represented by Bach (2001, 2005) and Recanati (2001, 2004) respectively, among others. The main purpose of this paper is to consider the validity of Hansen’s (2008) proposal based on courtroom data, and to argue that the availability of the literal meaning to language users seems to be a myth. (Ewha Womans University)