Abstract
I distinguish between the classical Gricean approach to conversational implicatures (CIs), which I call the action-theoretic (AT) 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 (CIs which most resemble classical Gricean CIs) 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 (2006, 2009) 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.
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Notes
Grice slightly modifies this claim in order to account for metaphorical uses of expressions; in such cases, Grice claims, the speaker makes as if to say that p in order to implicate that q. This is because, for Grice, to say that p is to speaker-mean what p literally means according to the conventions of the language. When a Romeo utters ‘My Juliet is the sun’, he does not speaker-mean that his Juliet is a flaming ball of gases. Thus Grice’s solution is to say that Romeo makes as if to say that his Juliet is a flaming ball of gases and thereby implicates that she is…whatever.
Soames (2008: 305–306) points out that the traditional Gricean story seems to require a firm line between what is said and what is implicated and, moreover, seems to require that speakers and hearers be consciously aware of this line, because they are supposed to be able, in principle, to work out all CIs, and this requires being aware of what a speaker has said. Since what is said is related to semantically encoded, conventional content (see previous note), this means that speakers and hearers need to be consciously aware of the semantically encoded meanings of expressions. Soames goes on to argue that there are clear cases of the literal use of language in which such Gricean derivations are unavailable to competent speakers because the requisite conscious awareness is missing.
I would also not want to deny that we never engage in conscious deliberation about what someone said or meant. One may obsess for days about what someone meant when they said something to you. You may run their words through your head over and over, trying to figure this out. (If you have a written record to rely on, this sort of deliberate reasoning may be easier). Did they mean to slight you? Were they subtly trying to hint at something that at first you missed? Was that a promise or a threat? Note however that this sort of deliberate reasoning is often focused on what Austin would have called the perlocutionary effects of a person’s utterance, and rarely do we obsess over the sorts of implicit meanings that I will be concerned with in this paper, which are drawn so automatically that people are hardly aware that they have made these inferences at all.
Note that with different background assumptions just the opposite would be implicated, namely that John doesn’t have a serious girlfriend. This would follow if we assume that the weekend visits were business related so that John has no time for girlfriends.
In fact, Panizza and Chierchia (2011) have some experimental evidence that SIs can be contextually induced in DEEs. They conducted an eye-tracking experiment with materials containing adjectival uses of numerals, such as ‘two cars’, which, according to neo-Griceans, are SI-triggers. They compared sentences such as (i) ‘If John parked two cars in the garage, he will park a motorcycle in the courtyard’ and (ii) ‘If John parked two cars in the garage, he will park a third car in the courtyard’ with control versions of each that conjoined their two sub-clauses. So for example, the control version of (ii) would be (ii*) ‘John parked two cars in the garage and he parked a third car in the courtyard’. These control versions are UEEs and allow for SI generation. In (ii*) the SI ‘only two cars’ will be generated and therefore there should be no processing difficulties when the reader encounters ‘a third car’ (whose semantics requires a contextually available set of cars of cardinality 2). On the other hand, in (ii) the scalar trigger ‘two cars’ occurs in a DEE and a SI should therefore be dispreferred. Thus a processing difficulty should show up when the reader encounters ‘a third car’. This should lead to rereading of ‘two cars’ while the reader re-analyses it as ‘only two cars’. This was indeed what Panizza and Chierchia found.
Clark and Haviland (1977) try to accommodate these cases within a Gricean framework by adding another conversational maxim to Grice’s set. In my view this is a mistake and they should instead have rejected the Gricean framework altogether.
It isn’t necessary to accept the PBI thesis to agree on this point. So long as one holds that it is the entire package of information that is shaped and evolves in the course of a conversation, one could accept the point made in the text above.
One does not need to be committed to a serial processing account in this instance, where the metaphorical content is derived first and the ironical interpretation comes later. It could be that the processing goes on in parallel, with mutual adjustment between the metaphorical and ironical interpretations, and such that the overall interpretation arrived at is one that makes the most sense, given the shared cognitive environment of the interlocutors. This is analogous to the story that Relevance Theorists tell regarding the processing of explicatures and implicatures. See Carston (2002); Wilson & Sperber (2012).
I would like to thank Alex Burri and Anna Kollenberg for their seemingly infinite patience in allowing me extra time to work on this contribution. I would also like to thank Alex for taking the time to send me valuable comments that I have tried to take account of, although I know I have not done them complete justice.
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Bezuidenhout, A. The Implicit Dimension of Meaning: Ways of “Filling In” and “Filling Out” Content. Erkenn 80 (Suppl 1), 89–109 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9661-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9661-6