Embedded Pragmatic Effects and Conversational Implicatures

Conversational Implicatures Via General Pragmatic Pressures

This paper aims to show how general pragmatic pressures, interacting with the context of utterance, can produce specific conversational implicatures — as well as the lack thereof in nonsupporting environments. Inspired by the work of Merin (1997), Blutner (1998), van Rooy (2003a), Benz et al. (2005), and others, I use probabilities to represent speakers’ belief states and the content of their u...

Conversational Implicatures

According to standard pragmatics, we should account for conversational implicatures in terms of Grice's (1975) maxims of conversation. Neo-Griceans like Atlas & Levinson (1981) and Horn (1984) seek to reduce those maxims to the so-called Q and I-principles. In this paper I want to argue that (i) there are major problems for reducing Gricean pragmatics to these two principles, and (ii) that, in ...

Conversational and conventional implicatures

Embedded Implicatures as Pragmatic Inferences under Compositional Lexical Uncertainty

How do comprehenders reason about pragmatically ambiguous scalar terms like some in complex syntactic contexts? In many pragmatic theories of conversational implicature, local exhaustification of such terms (‘only some’) is predicted to be difficult or impossible if the result does not entail the literal meaning, whereas grammatical accounts predict such construals to be robustly available. Rec...

rEfErEntial DEscriptions anD conVErsational iMplicaturEs

The standard Gricean defense of russell in the face of referential uses of descriptions has been to claim that these uses are conversational implicatures. My argument in “The case for referential Descriptions” focused on showing that these uses are not particularized implicatures. I now adapt and develop this argument to show that they are not generalized implicatures nor otherwise pragmatic. I...