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MIT 24 954 - Chapter 1 CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES AND COMMUNICATION THEORY

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Chapter 1CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES ANDCOMMUNICATION THEORYRobert van Rooy∗Institute for Logic, Language and ComputationUniversity of AmsterdamNieuwe Doelenstraat 15, 1012 CP [email protected] According to standard pragmatics, we should account for conversationalimplicatures in terms of Grice’s (1975) maxims of conversation. Neo-Griceans like Atlas & Levinson (1981) and Horn (1984) seek to reducethose maxims to the so-called Q and I-principles. In this paper I want toargue that (i) there are major problems for reducing Gricean pragmaticsto these two principles, and (ii) that, in fact, we’d better account forimplicatures in terms of the principles of (a) optimal relevance and (b)optimal coding. To formulate both, I will make use of Shannon’s (1948)mathematical theory of communication.1. IntroductionNatural language is flexible in the sense that a single message canconvey different semantic contents in different contexts. And indeed,recent trends in semantics (e.g. optimality theoretic semantics) suggestthat the actual interpretation of an utterance is highly underspecified bythe conventional meanings of the sentence that is used. This requires,however, that language users have robust ways to resolve the under-specification and/or ambiguity. In this paper I will discuss two ways ofdoing this. First, one where the particular conversational situation isimportant; second, one which depends on more general conventions.∗This research has been made possible by a fellowship of the Royal Netherlands Academy ofArts and Sciences.122. Particularized Conversational Implicatures2.1 The Q and I principleNeo-Gricean pragmatics (Atlas & Levinson, 1981; Horn, 1984; Levin-son 2000) seeks to reduce Grice’s maxims of conversation to the so-called Q and I principles. Both are used to account for many conversa-tional implicatures. The Q-principle (implementing Grice’s first maximof Quantity) advises the speaker to say as much as he can to fulfill hiscommunicative goals, while the I-principle (implementing Grice’s othermaxims, except for quality) advises the speaker to say no more than hemust to fulfill these goals. Both principles help to strengthen what iscommunicated by a sentence. The Q-principle induces inferences fromthe use of one expression to the assumption that the speaker did notintend to communicate a contrasting, and informationally stronger, one.This principle is thus essentially metalinguistic in kind, and accountsfor both scalar and clausal implicatures. It allows us, for instance, toconclude from ‘John ate some of the cookies’ to ‘John didn’t eat all ofthe cookies’ (scalar implicature), and from ‘A or B’ to ‘A or B, but notboth’ (clausal + scalar implicature). The I-principle allows us to inferfrom the use of an expression to its most informative or stereotypicalinterpretation. It is used, for instance, to enrich the interpretation ofa conjunction to a temporal sequential, or causal, relation, and it al-lows us to interpret a conditional like ‘John walks, if Mary walks’ as thebiconditional ‘John walks if and only Mary walks’.2.2 Problems for the Q and I principlesAlthough the Q and I principles are intuitively appealing, they giverise to a number of conceptual and empirical problems. They bothunder- and overgenerate.2.2.1 Too general. Let’s start with some cases where it ispredicted that Q-implicatures arise, although in fact they don’t. First,at least when implemented as Gazdar (1979) did, we can derive from theexistential ‘Someone is sick’ as a Q-implicature that (the speaker knowsthat) a is not sick, for any individual a. Second, on the assumption thatscales are defined in terms of entailment, it is predicted that we can inferfrom ‘B, if A’ to the conclusion that it is not the case that the stronger ‘Bif and only if A’ holds, although in a lot of situations this is exactly whatwe can conclude. Third, on the same assumption, it is incorrectly pre-dicted that we can infer ‘not regret A’ from ‘know A’. Horn, Levinson andothers have argued that these problems can be prevented by (i) weak-Conversational Implicatures and Communication Theory 3ening the force of Q-implicatures from know-not to not-know (for thefirst problem), and by putting constraints on what counts as contrastiveexpressions: contrastive expressions must be lexical items (second prob-lem) and must have the same presuppositions (for the third). Althoughit can be argued that for the biconditional interpretation this – some-what ad hoc – solution solves the second problem, Gazdar (1979) arguedthat the constraints doesn’t solve the third one. Moreover, the most se-rious problematic cases where Q-implicatures overgenerate cannot beexplained away in this way: The Horn/Gazdar/Levinson/Atlas analy-sis of Q-implicatures as generalized conversational implicatures (PCIs)triggered solely by lexical expressions cannot explain why from A’s an-swer ‘John has 2 children’ to Q’s question ‘Who has 2 children?’ theimplicature ‘John has only 2 children’ does not even arise as a default(cf. van Kuppevelt). This latter example seems to suggest that theseso-called Q-implicatures are, after all, dependent on the conversationalsituation, in particular on the question being asked. Proponents of theQ and I pragmatics (Horn, Levinson), followed by Matsumoto (1995),argue that in such particular conversational situations the generalizedconversational implicature is cancelled, for reasons of relevance: The an-swer is already informative enough for the purpose of the conversation.I will argue, however, that informativity is, in general, not the crucialissue, and that it is much more natural to assume that – for reasons ofrelevance in this particular situation – the (potential) implicature doesnot even arise.2.2.2 Not general enough. Not only does the standard anal-ysis of Q-implicatures overgeneralize, it also doesn’t seem to be generalenough. First, as discussed extensively by Hirschberg (1985), the stan-dard analysis is of no help to account for certain examples that intuitivelyshould be analyzed as scalar implicatures. If Mary’s potential new bossasks her at her job-interview whether she speaks French, and she answersby saying ‘My sister does’, he can conclude that Mary herself does not.The standard analysis fails to account for this, because (a) scalar impli-catures are all analyzed in terms of the Q-principle, (b) the Q-principleis


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MIT 24 954 - Chapter 1 CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES AND COMMUNICATION THEORY

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