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Implicit Content and the Argument from Binding

In the case of (1), we are supposed to have asked Stephen Neale how his dinner party went last night (Neale 1990: 94–95) and received this as the reply. Obviously, we do not take Neale to be saying that everyone in the world was sick; we interpret him as saying that everyone who attended his dinner party was sick. How, then, do we come to incorporate the property of attending Neale’s dinner party into the proposition expressed, when it does not seem to be the denotation of any overt lexical items in the utterance? In uttering (2), I might be asserting that I have not eaten dinner today (Bach 1994: 135–136), even though I do not use any audible words meaning ‘dinner’ or ‘today’. (I might thereby intend to create an implicature to the effect that we should go to a restaurant.) And in saying (3), I might be claiming that it is raining at 11.59pm on Halloween 2008 in Arkham, Massachusetts, even though I do not appear to mention any place (Perry 1986, Stanley 2000, Recanati 2002, 2004, 2007, Marti 2006, Neale 2007). I will be concentrating on two questions about implicit content. The first is the question of the level of representation at which implicit content first makes its presence felt. Are there unpronounced items in the syntax of the sentence uttered whose semantic value is implicit content? If so, what are their syntactic properties? Or does implicit content leave no trace, as it were, in the syntax but appear only in conceptual representations or the language of thought?