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Abstract: The Gricean theory of conversational implicature has always been plagued by data suggesting that what would seem to be conversational inferences may occur within the scope of operators like believe , for example; which for bona fide implicatures should be an impossibility. Concentrating my attention on scalar implicatures, I argue that, for the most part, such observations can be accounted for within a Gricean framework, and without resorting to local pragmatic inferences of any kin d. However, there remains a (...) |
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This article develops a Gricean account for the computation of scalarimplicatures in cases where one scalar term is in the scope ofanother. It shows that a cross-product of two quantitative scalesyields the appropriate scale for many such cases. One exception iscases involving disjunction. For these, I propose an analysis that makesuse of a novel, partially ordered quantitative scale for disjunction andcapitalizes on the idea that implicatures may have different epistemic status. |
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According to the alternative semantics for focus, the semantic reflec of intonational focus is a second semantic value, which in the case of a sentence is a set of propositions. We examine a range of semantic and pragmatic applications of the theory, and extract a unitary principle specifying how the focus semantic value interacts with semantic and pragmatic processes. A strong version of the theory has the effect of making lexical or construction-specific stipulation of a focus-related effect in association-with-focus constructions (...) |
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A conversational implicature is an inference that consists in attributing to a speaker an implicit meaning that goes beyond the explicit linguistic meaning of an utterance. This paper experimentallyinvestigates scalar implicature, a paradigmatic case of implicature in which a speaker's use of a term like Some indicates that the speaker had reasons not to use a more informative one from the samescale, e.g. All; thus, Some implicates Not all. Pragmatic theorists like Grice would predict that a pragmatic interpretation is determined (...) |
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This article brings together two independent lines of research on numerally quantified expressions, e.g. two girls. One stems from work in linguistic theory and asks what truth conditional contributions such expressions make to the utterances in which they are used--in other words, what do numerals mean? The other comes from the study of language development and asks when and how children learn the meaning of such expressions. My goal is to show that when integrated, these two perspectives can both constrain (...) |
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Scalar implicatures depend on alternatives in order to avoid the symmetry problem. I argue for a structure-sensitive characterization of these alternatives: the alternatives for a structure are all those structures that are at most as complex as the original one. There have been claims in the literature that complexity is irrelevant for implicatures and that the relevant condition is the semantic notion of monotonicity. I provide new data that pose a challenge to the use of monotonicity and that support the (...) |
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The notion of measurement plays a central role in human cognition. We measure people’s height, the weight of physical objects, the length of stretches of time, or the size of various collections of individuals. Measurements of height, weight, and the like are commonly thought of as mappings between objects and dense scales, while measurements of collections of individuals, as implemented for instance in counting, are assumed to involve discrete scales. It is also commonly assumed that natural language makes use of (...) |
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Only human beings have a rich conceptual repertoire with concepts like tort, entropy, Abelian group, mannerism, icon and deconstruction. How have humans constructed these concepts? And once they have been constructed by adults, how do children acquire them? While primarily focusing on the second question, in The Origin of Concepts , Susan Carey shows that the answers to both overlap substantially. Carey begins by characterizing the innate starting point for conceptual development, namely systems of core cognition. Representations of core cognition (...) |
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Recently there has been a lively revival of interest in implicatures, particularly scalar implicatures. Building on the resulting literature, our main goal in the present paper is to establish an empirical generalization, namely that SIs can occur systematically and freely in arbitrarily embedded positions. We are not so much concerned with the question whether drawing implicatures is a costly option (in terms of semantic processing, or of some other markedness measure). Nor are we specifically concerned with how implicatures come about (...) |
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This paper will be concerned with the conjunctive interpretation of a family of disjunctive constructions. The relevant conjunctive interpretation, sometimes referred to as a “free choice effect,” (FC) is attested when a disjunctive sentence is embedded under an existential modal operator. I will provide evidence that the relevant generalization extends (with some caveats) to all constructions in which a disjunctive sentence appears under the scope of an existential quantifier, as well as to seemingly unrelated constructions in which conjunction appears under (...) |
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