A fine-grained global analysis of implicatures

In recent years, a local, or even grammatical analysis of implicatures has gained popularity in pragmatics, especially to account for implicatures triggered by disjunctions embedded under other operators. Against this trend, in this paper a more traditional—and perhaps more Gricean—global analysis of implicatures is defended. Crucial use is made of facts, which provide a more fine-grained notion of meaning than traditionally assumed in truth-functional semantics. A Gricean motivation for this analysis will be provided as well. The fact-based analysis will also allow one to formulate a constraint much weaker than one due Hurford to explain the inappropriateness of certain disjunctive sentences.