Implicature

This Article explores the interpretation and construction of executive orders using as examples President Trump’s two executive orders captioned “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States” (the “Two Executive Orders”). -/- President Trump issued the Two Executive Orders in the context of (among other things) Candidate Trump’s statements such as: “Islam hates us,” and “[W]e can’t allow people coming into this country who have this hatred.” President Trump subsequently provided further context including his tweet about the (...) second of his Two Executive Orders: “People, the lawyers and the courts can call [the second of the Two Executive Orders] whatever they want, but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!” -/- Although President Trump replaced the first of the Two Executive Orders with the second one and although the Supreme Court by orders dated October 10, 2017 and October 24, 2017, vacated and remanded litigation involving the second order on grounds of mootness, the Two Executive Orders remain highly instructive for those who would understand the interpretation and construction of executive orders. -/- This article therefore examines in detail the original speaker's (i.e., President Trump's) intended meaning and effect of the Two Executive Orders. It performs such examination using insights from the semiotic subfield of pragmatics, a semiotic subfield which explores how real-world people actually use, interpret, and construe language in various real-world contexts (including contexts where the issuer of the Two Executive Orders himself has claimed that “Islam hates us” and has tweeted “TRAVEL BAN!”). Using such insights of pragmatics, this Article also explores why reasonable judges thoroughly versed in legal theory, legal practice, and pragmatics should conclude that President Trump unlawfully targeted Muslims in the Two Executive Orders. This Article, among other things, also questions the sensibility of such notions as “facial legitimacy” to the extent such notions suggest text has meaning apart from context. -/- Keywords: executive orders, speaker meaning, interpretation, construction, semiotics, pragmatics, originalism, speech acts, context, facial legitimacy, Constitutionality, First Amendment,Trump v. Int’l Refugee Assistance Project, Scalia, immigration, semantics, original meaning, travel ban, Trump, textualism. (shrink)

In response to Mandy Simons’ defence of a classical Gricean approach to pragmatic enrichment in terms of conversational implicature, I emphasize the following contrast. Conversational implicatures are generated by a global inference which uses as a premise the fact that the speaker has said that p, but only the triggering inference is global in cases of pragmatic enrichment. What generates the correct interpretation is a process of reconstrual, which locally maps the literal meaning of a constituent to a modulated meaning (...) and composes that meaning with that of the other constituents. That process is constrained by Gricean considerations but that is true of all pragmatic aspects of interpretation, whether pre-propositional or post-propositional. Just as indexical resolution, though pragmatic and constrained by Gricean considerations, does not fit the two-stage model through which Grice accounts for conversational implicatures, so pragmatic modulation can’t be accounted for in terms of that model despite the fact that, like conversational implicatures and unlike indexical resolution, modulation is pragmatically rather than semantically triggered. (shrink)

Grice's distinction between what is said by a sentence and what is implicated by an utterance of it is both extremely familiar and almost universally accepted. However, in recent literature, the precise account he offered of implicature recovery has been questioned and alternative accounts have emerged. In this paper, I examine three such alternative accounts. My main aim is to show that the two most popular accounts in the current literature still face signifi cant problems. I will then conclude by (...) suggesting that an alternative account, emerging from semantic minimalism, is best placed to accommodate Grice's distinction. (shrink)

An utterer may convey a message to her intended audience by means of an explicit statement; or by a non‐conventionally mediated one‐off signal from which the audience is able to work out the intended message; or by conversational implicature. I investigate whether the last two are equivalent to explicit testifying, as communicative act and epistemic source. I find that there are important differences between explicit statement and insinuation; only with the first does the utterer assume full responsibility for the truth (...) of what she communicates to her audience. (shrink)

Williamson defiende la regla del conocimiento, RK, sobre las aseveraciones: debemos aseverar que p sólo si sabemos que p. En este trabajo exploro algunas consecuencias interesantes de RK: en ocasiones, al hacer una aseveración correcta transmitimos un significado no literal verdadero, que \sin embargo\ no podría ser correctamente aseverado; ese tipo de implicatura se da, entre otros casos, en una cierta subclase de las implicaturas: las implicaturas argumentativas; RK y la noción de implicatura argumentativa permiten explicar la tendencia a tratar (...) de forma equivalente diferentes tipos de argumentos antiescépticos inspirados en Moore.Williamson defends the knowledge rule, KR, about assertions: one must: assert p only if one knows p. In this work I explore some interesting consequences of KR: sometimes, when making a correct assertion we transmit a true non-literal meaning which \nevertheless\ could not be rightly asserted; this kind of implicatures are present, for instance, in a certain subclass of implicatures: argumentative implicatures; KR and the notion of argumentative implicature allow for an explanation of the tendency to treat different kinds of Moore-like antiskeptical arguments as if they were equivalent. (shrink)

I distinguish between the classical Gricean approach to conversational implicatures, which I call the action-theoretic approach, and the approach to CIs taken in contemporary cognitive science. Once we free ourselves from the AT account, and see implicating as a form of what I call “conversational tailoring”, we can more easily see the many different ways that CIs arise in conversation. I will show that they arise not only on the basis of a speaker’s utterance of complete sentences but also on (...) the basis of sub-sentential clauses—cases of so-called embedded implicatures—as well as from discourse segments containing several sentences—cases that Geurts calls ‘multiplicatures’. I will argue that they arise also from contents that are themselves implicit, such as presupposed contents or other implicatures. All but the first sort of case are difficult for the traditional Gricean AT account to handle, whereas they fall naturally out of an account that sees conversational participants as engaged in conversational tailoring—i.e., as engaged in a process of shaping informational and discourse structural properties of utterances in their successive conversational turns, and hence shaping their interlocutors’ cognitive environments. (shrink)

Lepore and Stone seek to replace the rationality-based Gricean picture of coordination between speaker and hearer with one leaning more strongly on the roles of convention and speaker knowledge while doing away with conversational implicature. Focusing on the phenomena of indirect speech acts, asymmetric conjunction, and scalar inferencing, I argue that the case for abandoning implicature as an analytical tool is not ultimately compelling. I seek further to demonstrate the utility of the classical Gricean distinction between what is said and (...) what is implicated in the construction of an intuitively appealing approach to the perennial question of how to distinguish lying from misleading inside and outside the legal domain. (shrink)

This paper is a contribution to the program of constructing formal representations of pragmatic aspects of human reasoning. We propose a formalization within the framework of Adaptive Logics of the exclusivity implicature governing the connective 'or'.

In this paper I discuss some of the criteria that are widely used in the linguistic and philosophical literature to classify an aspect of meaning as either semantic or pragmatic. With regards to the case of scalar implicature (e.g. some Fs are G implying that not all Fs are G), these criteria are not ultimately conclusive, either in the results of their application, or in the interpretation of the results with regards to the semantics/pragmatics distinction (or in both). I propose (...) a psychologically relevant criterion, that of the primary or secondary role of context. This criterion applies to sub-personal processes that derive the interpretation of a scalar term rather than to the eventual interpretation of the term, and there exist well-established experimental paradigms that can generate quantitative data. I present recent studies on scalar implicature which employ such off-line and real-time paradigms, aiming to demonstrate how research on the semantics/pragmatics distinction can benefit from experimental investigation. (shrink)

Gricean communication is communication between utterers and their audiences, where the utterer means something and the audience understands what is meant. The weak transmission idea is that, whenever such communication takes place, there is something which is transmitted from utterer to audience; the strong transmission idea adds that what is transmitted is nothing else than what is communicated. We try to salvage these ideas from a seemingly forceful attack by Wayne Davis. Davis attaches too much significance to the surface structure (...) of sentences of the type ‘S communicates the belief (desire …) that p to A’ by assuming that the communicated entity is denoted by the grammatical object following ‘communicates’. On our proposal, what is communicated in all Gricean cases is a thought. And since S communicates the thought that p to A only if S means that p and A understands what S means, the thought that p will be transmitted from S to A. (shrink)

Paul Grice coined the term "implicature" in his 1967 William James Lectures. A speaker implicates a proposition if it is part of what he or she communicates, but not part of what he or she literally says. For example, when you direct a stranger to a gas station, you implicate that it is open. This is communicated, but not literally said. The only viable theory of implicature in the philosophical literature is Grice's own theory, which appeals to a "cooperative principle" (...) and a set of "maxims" to explain implicatures. The first chapter of this dissertation argues that Grice's theory does not produce detailed and testable predictions. The remaining three chapters develop a "plan-based theory of implicature", using ideas from computational linguistics. In Chapter Two, I consider the general problem of plan recognition, developing a representation for plans and rules for reasoning about them. Chapter Three discusses the key concept "a speaker's plan", and applies it to several of Grice's examples. Chapter Four extends the analysis to conversations whose point is to construct a domain plan. (shrink)

This paper proposes that both weak and strong NPIs in English are sensitive to the downward entailingness of their licensers. It is also proposed, however, that these two types of NPIs pay attention to different aspects of the meaning of their environment. As observed by von Fintel and Chierchia, weak NPIs do not attend to the scalar implicatures of presuppositions of their licensers. Strong NPIs see both the truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional (scalar implications, presuppositions) meaning of their licensers. This theory accounts (...) for the puzzling inability, noted by Rullmann and Gajewski, of Strawson anti-additive operators to license strong NPIs, as well as for the effects of Zwarts’s hierarchy of negative strength. Additional issues concerning comparative quantifiers, few, and proportional quantifiers are addressed. (shrink)

This paper offers an analysis of metalinguistic comparatives such as more dumb than crazy in which they differ from ordinary comparatives in the scale on which they compare: ordinary comparatives use scales lexically determined by particular adjectives, but metalinguistic ones use a generally-available scale of imprecision or ‘pragmatic slack’. To implement this idea, I propose a novel compositional implementation of the Lasersohnian pragmatic-halos account of imprecision—one that represents clusters of similar meanings as Hamblin alternatives. In the theory that results, existential (...) closure over alternatives mediates between alternative-sets and meanings in which imprecision has been resolved. I then articulate a version of this theory in which the alternatives are not related meanings but rather related utterances, departing significantly from Lasersohn’s original conception. Although such a theory of imprecision is more clearly ‘metalinguistic’, the evidence for it from metalinguistic comparatives in English is surprisingly limited. The overall picture that emerges is one in which the grammatical distinction between ordinary and metalinguistic comparatives tracks the independently motivated distinction between vagueness and imprecision. (shrink)

We present an argument for revising the theory of alternatives for Scalar Implicatures and for Association with Focus. We argue that in both cases the alternatives are determined in the same way, as a contextual restriction of the focus value of the sentence, which, in turn, is defined in structure-sensitive terms. We provide evidence that contextual restriction is subject to a constraint that prevents it from discriminating between alternatives when they stand in a particular logical relationship with the assertion or (...) the prejacent, a relationship that we refer to as symmetry. Due to this constraint on contextual restriction, discriminating between alternatives in cases of symmetry becomes the task of focus values. This conclusion is incompatible with standard type-theoretic definitions of focus values, motivating our structure-sensitive definition instead. (shrink)

Predicates such as tall or to know Latin, which intuitively denote permanent properties, are called individual-level predicates. Many peculiar properties of this class of predicates have been noted in the literature. One such property is that we cannot say #John is sometimes tall. Here is a way to account for this property: this sentence sounds odd because it triggers the scalar implicature that the alternative John is always tall is false, which cannot be, given that, if John is sometimes tall, (...) then he always is. This intuition faces two challenges. First: this scalar implicature has a weird nature, since it must be surprisingly robust (otherwise, it could be cancelled and the sentence rescued) and furthermore blind to the common knowledge that tallness is a permanent property (since this piece of common knowledge makes the two alternatives equivalent). Second: it is not clear how this intuition could be extended to other, more complicated properties of individual-level predicates. The goal of this paper is to defend the idea of an implicature-based theory of individual-level predicates by facing these two challenges. In the first part of the paper, I try to make sense of the weird nature of these special mismatching implicatures within the recent grammatical framework for scalar implicatures of Chierchia (Structures and beyond, 2004) and Fox (2007). In the second part of the paper, I show how this implicature-based line of reasoning can be extended to more complicated properties of individual-level predicates, such as restrictions on the interpretation of their bare plural subjects, noted in Carlson (Reference to kinds in English. Doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1977), Milsark (Linguistic Analysis 3.1: 1–29, 1977), and Fox (Natural Language Semantics 3: 283–341, 1995); restrictions on German word order, noted in Diesing (Indefinites, 1992); and restrictions on Q-adverbs, noted in Kratzer (The Generic Book, ed. Carlson and Pelletier, 125–175, 1995). (shrink)

The paper concerns the expression of non-strict comparison, focusing in particular on constructions of the form [no(t) . . .-er than] in modified numerals. The main empirical finding is the observation that negated comparatives contrast with regular comparatives in that the former but not the latter can give rise to (scalar) implicatures. It is shown that such a contrast falls out of theories of exhaustive interpretation that claim alternatives to form dense scales. An important result is that the paper sharpens (...) the desiderata for theories of exhaustification. (shrink)

This paper is about even in downward entailing contexts. Karttunen and Peters (1979) have shown that there are two different sets of implicatures of even in such contexts. They argue that the two sets of implicatures are derived by allowing even to take scope either higher or lower than a negative polarity licenser. Rooth (1985) argues that even is lexically ambiguous, that is, there is a negative polarity even. I argue against Rooth's ambiguity theory and show that within Rooth's theory (...) of focus, a scope theory of even has better empirical coverage. I also answer objections to the scope theory raised by Rooth (1985) and Karttunen and Karttunen (1977). (shrink)

Paul Grice has given an account of conversational implicatures that hinges on the hypothesis that communication is a cooperative activity performed by rational agents which pursue a common goal. The attempt to derive Grice’s principles from game theory is a natural step, since its aim is to predict the behaviour of rational agents in situations where the outcome of one agent’s choice depends also on the choices of others. Generalised conversational implicatures, and in particular scalar ones, offer an ideal test (...) bed for this working hypothesis, since with this kind of implicatures the alternative choices available to the agents are less dependent on context, and they can be derived from the meanings of the sentences employed. Some rival game-theoretic accounts of the same phenomena will be criticised. The present paper shows that scalar implicatures can be explained using iterated admissibility, but that some of these need an additional assumption in order to be accounted for. (shrink)

Grice’s Razor is a methodological principle that many philosophers and linguists have used to help justify pragmatic explanations of linguistic phenomena over semantic explanations. A number of authors in the debate over contextualism argue that an invariant semantics together with Grice’s (1975) conversational principles can account for the contextual variability of knowledge claims. I show here that the defense of Grice’s Razor found in these “Gricean invariantists,” and its use against epistemic contextualism, display all the problems pointed out earlier in (...) Davis (1998). The everyday variation in acceptable knowledge claims is better explained in terms of implicature than indexicality, but general conversational principles shed little light on whether ‘know’ is used hyperbolically, meiotically, or loosely in a context, although this issue is crucial in deciding what if anything ‘S knows p’ implicates. I present reasons favoring an account of the representative bank case in terms of loose use, making clear how they differ from Grice’s Razor. (shrink)

Várias tentativas foram feitas pelos teóricos da referência direta para acomodar o dado intuitivo da opacidade referencial— a não ocorrência de substituição mútua salva veritate de nomes próprios co-referenciais nas orações subordinadas, precedidas por ‘que’, nas orações em que se atribuem atitudes proposicionais. A teoria defendida por Nathan Salmon, em seu livro de 1986 Frege’s Puzzle , é provavelmente a versão mais bem elaborada daquilo a que adiante nos referimos como ‘a Teoria Implicativa’. Salmon sustenta que a opacidade referencial é (...) uma ilusão decorrente de nossa incapacidade de distinguir o conteúdo semântico de atribuições de crenças das suas ‘partilhas pragmáticas’, como Salmon as chama. Lamentavelmente, seu trabalho deixa de todo misterioso o mecanismo rotineiro de produção de tais partilhas pragmáticas. Salmon limita-se a sugerir vagamente que estão envolvidas implicaturas conversacionais griceanas. Minha tese central neste artigo é a de que Salmon está equivocado, visto que as partilhas pragmáticas necessárias à sua teoria não satisfazem o critério de cancelabilidade , o que deveria ocorrer sempre que estamos às voltas com uma genuína implicatura conversacional. O argumento apresentado, até onde o saibamos, é inteiramente original. DOI:10.5007/1808-1711.2010v14n3p405. (shrink)

Recent semantic research has made increasing use of a principle, Maximize Presupposition, which requires that under certain circumstances the strongest possible presupposition be marked. This principle is generally taken to be irreducible to standard Gricean reasoning because the forms that are in competition have the same assertive content. We suggest, however, that Maximize Presupposition might be reducible to the theory of scalar implicatures. (i)First, we consider a special case: the speaker utters a sentence with a presupposition p which is not (...) initially taken for granted by the addressee, but the latter takes the speaker to be an authority on the matter. Signaling the presupposition provides new information to the addressee; but it also follows from the logic of presupposition qua common belief that the presupposition is thereby satisfied (Stalnaker, Ling Philos 25(5–6):701–721, 2002). (ii) Second, we generalize this solution to other cases. We assume that even when p is common belief, there is a very small chance that the addressee might forget it (‘Fallibility’); in such cases, marking a presupposition will turn out to generate new information by re-establishing part of the original context. We also adopt from Raj Singh (Nat Lang Semantics 19(2):149–168, 2011) the hypothesis that presupposition maximization is computed relative to local contexts—and we assume that these too are subject to Fallibility; this accounts for cases in which the information that justifies the presupposition is linguistically provided. (iii) Finally, we suggest that our assumptions have benefits in the domain of implicatures: they make it possible to reinterpret Magri’s ‘blind’ (i.e. context-insensitive) implicatures as context-sensitive implicatures which just happen to be misleading. (shrink)

Is language understanding a special case of social cognition? To help evaluate this view, we can formalize it as the rational speech-act theory: Listeners assume that speakers choose their utterances approximately optimally, and listeners interpret an utterance by using Bayesian inference to “invert” this model of the speaker. We apply this framework to model scalar implicature (“some” implies “not all,” and “N” implies “not more than N”). This model predicts an interaction between the speaker's knowledge state and the listener's interpretation. (...) We test these predictions in two experiments and find good fit between model predictions and human judgments. (shrink)

Indefinites face competition at two levels: Presupposition and content. The antipresupposition hypothesis predicts that they signal the opposite of familiarity, or uniqueness, namely, novelty, or non-uniqueness. At the level of descriptive content, they are pressured from two sides: definites expressing identity and another phrases expressing difference, and Gricean reasoning predicts that indefinites signal both difference and identity and are infelicitous when definites and another phrases are felicitous. However, occasionally a space opens between the and another, for a to fill. This (...) is in part due to conditions handicapping the or another semantically, in part to another’s phonological handicap. The division of labor between determiners in the field of difference and sameness is thus the result of an intricate competition. We model this competition in a version of game-theoretic pragmatics. (shrink)

According to the standard analysis, quantifiers such as , connectives such as , modals such as and a host of other expressions form informational scales (Horn, 1972). In the canonical case, informational scales are defined on the basis of entailment (e.g. p and q asymmetrically entails p or q). Given the Gricean assumption that speakers try to say as much as they truthfully can that is relevant to the conversational exchange, the fact that an informationally weaker term was used in (...) (1)-(3) often gives the listener reason to think that the speaker was not in a position to offer a stronger statement (presumably because such a statement would be false). Thus, even though weak scalar expressions such as some and or have a lower-bounded semantics (for instance some means ‘some and possibly all’), their semantic content is typically upper-bounded by a conversational implicature (e.g. ‘some but not all’). More recently, the precise mechanisms responsible for the computation of scalar implicatures (SIs) have become the topic of much debate. There is considerable disagreement as to whether SIs are derived on the basis of broadly Gricean quantity considerations, as the traditional account would have it, or post- Gricean relevance-oriented computations, whether they are the result of local or global calculations, and whether they are context-specific or generalized, default inferences (for varying perspectives, see Hirschberg, 1985; Sperber and Wilson, 1986/1995; Grice, 1989; Carston, 1990, 1998; Horn, 1992; Levinson, 2000; Chierchia, 2001). In several cases, SIs have been used to motivate and illustrate very different views of the architecture of the semantics-pragmatics interface. Despite their prominent place in the theoretical linguistic literature, scalar inferences have attracted relatively little attention in psycholinguistics.. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the conditions under which a person can be said to have told someone or predicted (the answer to a question like) ‘who came’.

[p. 45] I wish to represent a certain subclass of nonconventional implicatures, which I shall call CONVERSATIONAL implicatures, as being essentially connected with certain general features of discourse; so my next step is to try to say what these features are. The following may provide a first approximation to a general principle. Our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks, and would not be rational if they did. They are characteristically, to some degree at least, (...) cooperative efforts; and each participant recognizes in them, to some extent, a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction. This purpose or direction may be fixed from the start (e.g., by an initial proposal of a question for discussion), or it may evolve during the exchange; it may be fairly definite, or it may be so indefinite as to leave very considerable latitude to the participants (as in a casual conversation). But at each stage, SOME possible conversational moves would be excluded as conversationally unsuitable. We might then formulate a rough general principle which participants will be expected (ceteris paribus) to observe, namely: Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. One might label this the COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE. On the assumption that some such general principle as this is acceptable, one may perhaps distinguish four categories under one or another of which will fall certain more specific maxims and submaxims, the following of which will, in general, yield results in accordance with the Cooperative Principle. Echoing Kant, I call these categories Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. The category of QUANTITY relates to the quantity of information to be provided, and under it fall the following maxims. (shrink)

The phenomenon we now know as projection was first observed by Frege in his brief remarks about presupposition in “Sense and Reference.” Frege observes there that the assertion that Kepler died in misery gives rise to the implication that the name Kepler has a referent; but that so too does the assertion that Kepler did not die in misery. Here we have the source of the observation that if p is a presupposition of S, then p is implied by (utterances (...) of) S and by (utterances of) the negation of S. Since Frege, it has been observed that those implications which are shared by a sentence S and by its negation are also typically shared by a variety of other entailment-canceling embeddings of S: in questions, in the antecedents of conditionals, and under epistemic possibility modals. This observation has entered the canon in the form of the “family of sentences” test (Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet 2000). This test is 1 standardly used to demonstrate that some particular element of content projects. An application of the test is demonstrated below. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Acknowledgements -- Notes on Contributors -- Introduction--K.Petrus -- H. Paul Grice's Defense of the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction and Its Unintended Historical Consequences in Twentieth Century Analytical Philosophy--J.Atlas -- Paul Grice and the Philosopher of Ordinary Language--S.Chapman -- Some Aspects on Reasons and Retionality--J.Baker -- The Total Content of What a Speaker Means--A.Martinich -- Showing and Meaning--M.Green -- Communicative Acts - With and Without Understanding--C.Plunze -- Perillocutionary Acts. A Gricean Approach--K.Petrus -- William James + 40: Issues in the (...) Investigation of Implicature--L.Horn -- Grice on Presupposition--A.Bezuidenhout -- Irregular Negations: Implicature and Idiom Theories--W.Davis -- Grice's Calculability Criterion and Speaker Meaning--J.Saul -- A Gricean View on Intrusive Implicatures--M.Simons -- Three Theories of Implicature: Default Theory, Relevance and Minimalism--E.Borg -- Contextualism--N.Kompa -- Index. (shrink)

1. Sentences have implicatures. (11, 14, 19)** 2. Implicatures are inferences. (12. 14) 3. Implicatures can’t be entailments. 4. Gricean maxims apply only to implicatures. (16, 17) 5. For what is implicated to be figured out, what is said must be determined first. (12, 13) 6. All pragmatic implications are implicatures. 7. Implicatures are not part of the truth-conditional contents of utterances. (20) 8. If something is meant but unsaid, it must be implicated. (20) 9. Scalar “implicatures” are implicatures. (11) (...) 10. Conventional “implicatures” are implicatures. (shrink)

It is often observed in metaethics that moral language displays a certain duality in as much as it seems to concern both objective facts in the world and subjective attitudes that move to action. In this paper, I defend The Dual Aspect Account which is intended to capture this duality: A person’s utterance of a sentence according to which φing has a moral characteristic, such as “φing is wrong,” conveys two things: The sentence expresses, in virtue of its conventional meaning, (...) the belief that φing has a moral property, and the utterance of the sentence carries a generalized conversational implicature to the effect that the person in question has an action-guiding attitude in relation to φing. This account has significant advantages over competing views: (i) As it is purely cognitivist, it does not have the difficulties of expressivism and various ecumenical positions. (ii) Yet, in spite of this, it can explain the close, “meaning-like,” connection between moral language and attitudes. (iii) In contrast to other pragmatic accounts, it is compatible with any relevant cognitivist view. (iv) It does not rest on a contentious pragmatic notion, such as conventional implicature. (v) It does not imply that utterances of complex moral sentences, such as conditionals, convey attitudes. In addition, the generalized implicature in question is fully calculable and cancellable. (shrink)

The computation of both Scalar Implicatures (SI) and Association with Focus (AF) is characterized with reference to sets of alternatives. However, it has generally been assumed that the relevant alternatives are determined in different ways for the two processes. Specifically, it has been assumed that the alternatives for SI – scalar alternatives – are computed by a special procedure specifically designed for implicatures, whereas the alternatives for AF – focus alternatives – are determined by the general theory of association with (...) focus – focus semantics. As far as we know, the only attempt to connect the two is Krifka (1995), under which scalar alternatives and focus alternatives are identical and determined by focus semantics. However, Krifka’s result is based on a specific stipulation about scalar items, which he borrows from Horn and incorporates into focus semantics, namely that scalar items are inherently focused and have their Horn Scale as their lexically specified focus values. (shrink)

The existence of “local implicatures” has been the topic of much recent debate. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this debate by asking what we can learn from three puzzles, namely, the cancellation of such implicatures by or both, their behavior in the complement clauses of negative factive verbs such as sorry, and their behavior in root and embedded questions. Two basic approaches to local implicatures have been advanced: a fully pragmatic account in which local implicatures result (...) from conventional Gricean principles and a semantic account according to which the generation of implicatures is interwoven with compositional, grammatical mechanisms. We argue that the lesson to be learned from our three case studies is that some kind of approach along the latter, grammatical line is necessary to account for the data. (shrink)

Larry Horn is justifiably famous for his work on the semantics of the English conjunction or and both its relationship to the formal logic truth functions ∨ and @ (“inclusive” and “exclusive” disjunction respectively1) and its relationship to the ways people employ or in natural discourse. These interests have been present since his 1972 dissertation, where he argued for a “scalar implicature-based” account of many of these relationships as opposed to a presuppositional account. They have surfaced in his “Greek Grice” (...) paper (Horn 1973) as well as in his Negation book (Horn 1989) and his recent “Border Wars” paper (Horn, forthcoming) where he defends the position that there are two types of implicatures at work here: Q- implicatures based on Grice’s first maxim of Quantity (“Say Enough”) and R-implicatures based on Grice’s second maxim of Quantity (“Don’t Say Too Much”). In a nutshell, the idea is that when a speaker employs a sentence with a disjunction, the meaning (that is, the semantic value) of the or is inclusive. With careful and judicious use of the Q- and R-implicatures, Larry’s theory allows the hearer (often) to infer that the speaker wanted to convey an exclusive disjunction. (shrink)

I am often asked to explain the difference between my notion of impliciture (Bach 1994) and the relevance theorists’ notion of explicature (Sperber and Wilson 1986; Carston 2002). Despite the differences between the theoretical frameworks within which they operate, the two notions seem very similar. Relevance theorists describe explicatures as “developments of logical forms,” whereas I think of implicitures as “expansions” or “completions” of semantic contents (depending on whether or not the sentence’s semantic content amounts to a proposition). That is (...) not much of a difference. We agree that implicitures/explicatures go beyond what is said (in a strict sense) and yet fall short of being implicatures. So, what is the difference, or is it just terminological? As we will see, the real differences emerge when the two notions are situated in their respective theoretical frameworks with their contrasting conceptions of what is involved in linguistic communication. (shrink)