Existentiality and Implicatures

Only: Meaning and implicatures

The issue of how to account for the interpretation of ‘only’ has always been exciting and challenging. Over the years many sophisticated proposals have been brought forward, but ‘only’ always managed to strike back by exposing another new and strange property. In this paper we will argue that there is a way to approach the meaning of ‘only’ that can deal with some of its well-known challenges b...

Games and Quantity Implicatures∗

In this paper we seek to account for scalar implicatures and Horn’s division of pragmatic labor in game-theoretical terms by making use mainly of refinements of the standard solution concept of signaling games. Scalar implicatures are accounted for in terms of Farrell’s (1993) notion of a ‘Neologism-Proof’ equilibrium together with Grice’s maxim of Quality. Horn’s division of pragmatic labor is...

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 ...

Relevance Implicatures

According to standard pragmatics, we should account for conversational implicatures in terms of Grice’s (1967) 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) in fact, ...

Conversational and conventional implicatures