I love me some datives: Expressive meaning, free datives, and F-implicature

In addition to introducing the very successful product line of conversational implicatures, Paul Grice and his successors have assembled an arguably inchoate class of phenomena under the trade name of CONVENTIONAL IMPLICATURE, whose reception in the scholarly marketplace has been somewhat bridled. A conventional implicature associated with expression E is a non-cancelable contribution to the content of an expression whose falsity does not affect the truth conditions of E. This construct has evoked much recent skepticism – Bach (1999) has consigned it to the dustbin of mythology, while Potts (2005 et seq.) has undertaken a pyrrhic rehabilitation via redefinition – but Grice’s admittedly sketchy device for treating aspects of content that are irrelevant to the truth conditions of an asserted proposition has a rich lineage. In delineating meanings that do not “affect the thought” or “touch what is true or false”, Frege (1892, 1897/1979, 1918) directly prefigured Grice’s conventional implicature. While much recent scholarship has followed Dummett (1973) in dismissing Frege’s positive proposals in this area as representing a confused, subjective notion of “tone”, this fails to do justice to Frege’s intention and practice. For a range of connectives, expressive particles, pronouns, and syntactic constructions, some proposed for the role by Frege and/or Grice and others not considered by them, such an approach remains eminently plausible.