Conversational Implicatures Via General Pragmatic Pressures

Abstract

This paper aims to show how general pragmatic pressures, interacting with the context of utterance, can produce specific conversational implicatures — as well as the lack thereof in nonsupporting environments. Inspired by the work of Merin (1997), Blutner (1998), van Rooy (2003a), Benz et al. (2005), and others, I use probabilities to represent speakers’ belief states and the content of their utterances. These values determine an utterance’s quality rating and quantity rating. I adapt Roberts’ (1996) view of the question under discussion to define a relevance ranking of utterances. These values come together in a definition of felicitous utterance. This definition licenses certain inferences — relevance implicatures relating to the question under discussion (section 4.1) and a variety of quantity implicatures (sections 4.2–4.3).

I’ve benefitted from an amazing amount of useful feedback on this general project. I’m indebted in particular to Jan Anderssen, Ash Asudeh, Rajesh Bhatt, Daniel Büring, Donna Byron, Shai Cohen, Regine Eckhardt, Kathryn Flack, Lyn Frazier, Hans-Martin Gärtner, Yurie Hara, Larry Horn, Gerhard Jäger, Pauline Jacobson, Mark Johnson, Ed Keenan, Angelika Kratzer, Manfred Krifka, Eric McCready, Barbara Partee, Tim Roeper, Tom Roeper, David Schueler, Florian Schwarz, Raj Singh, Tim Stowell, Anna Verbuk, Mike White and audiences at the UMass Amherst Semantics Group (Sep 6, 2005), Göttingen University (Sep 21, 2005), ZAS (Sep 23, 2005), UCLA (Dec 1, 2005), Yale (Nov 7, 2005), OSU (Feb 24, 2006), and Brown (Mar 6, 2006). Craige Roberts provided some crucial insights at a crucial moment in my development of these ideas.