Exhaustivity Through the Maxim of Relation

I show that the exhaustive interpretation of answers can be explained as a conversational implicature through the Maxim of Relation, dealing with the problematic epistemic step (Sauerland, 2004). I assume a fairly standard Maxim of Relation, that captures the same intuition as Roberts’ (1996) contextual entailment. I show that if a richer notion of meaning is adopted, in particular that of attentive semantics (Roelofsen, 2011), this Maxim of Relation automatically becomes strong enough to enable exhaustivity implicatures. The results suggest that pragmatic reasoning is sensitive not only to the information an utterance provides, but also to the possibilities it draws attention to. Foremost, it shows that exhaustivity implicatures can be genuine conversational implicatures.