A Gricean View on Intrusive Implicatures

particular, scalar implicatures are at the heart of a very vigorous current debate about the structure of the interpretative process. However, even if one is convinced that there are conversational implicatures of the standard Gricean sort, one might not be convinced that these two cases are best explained in Gricean terms. The enriched interpretation of coordination, for example, might seem better explained within a general theory of coherence. Questions can also be raised about the standard account of scalar implicatures. Happily for me, the argument I will present below is unaffected by the question of whether these particular cases are correctly analyzed in Gricean terms. The argument I will give is an argument that the principles for the calculation of conversational implicatures are equally applicable to complete utterances with speech act force and to sub-parts of utterances. Whether these principles are actually applied in any specific case is tangential to my argument.