The Logic of Conventional ImplicaturesThis book revives the study of conventional implicatures in natural language semantics. H. Paul Grice first defined the concept. Since then his definition has seen much use and many redefinitions, but it has never enjoyed a stable place in linguistic theory. Christopher Potts returns to the original and uses it as a key into two presently under-studied areas of natural language: supplements (appositives, parentheticals) and expressives (e.g., honorifics, epithets). The account of both depends on a theory in which sentence meanings can be multidimensional. The theory is logically and intuitively compositional, and it minimally extends a familiar kind of intensional logic, thereby providing an adaptable, highly useful tool for semantic analysis. The result is a linguistic theory that is accessible not only to linguists of all stripes, but also philosophers of language, logicians, and computer scientists who have linguistic applications in mind. |
Contents
1 Introduction | 1 |
2 A preliminary case for conventional implicatures | 5 |
3 A logic for conventional implicatures | 47 |
4 Supplements | 89 |
5 Expressive content | 153 |
A syntactic alternative | 195 |
7 A look outside Grices definition | 211 |
The logics omittedsubCI and omittedsubU | 219 |
| 229 | |
| 239 | |
| 243 | |
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Common terms and phrases
adverbs Alonzo analysis anchor appositive argument As-parenthetical at-issue content at-issue dimension at-issue entailments at-issue meanings at-issue types attributive adjectives basic Chapter Chuck combinatoric composition conversational implicatures cyclist damn defined definition of CIs denotation description logic discourse participants discourse structures discussion domain Ed Witten Edward Witten embedded epithets example expressive content extensional fact functor grammar Grice’s heritage function Huddleston and Pullum Illinois State Lottery intensional intensional models interpretation function intuition Karttunen and Peters Konjunktiv Lance Armstrong Lebanese Arabic lexical items linguistic main clause Maria is sick McCawley meaning language model-theoretic multidimensional Potts pragmatic predicate presuppositions properties propositional attitude quantifier readings relative clause restriction root node scope seems semantic parsetree semantic translation sentence speaker oriented speaker-oriented supplement relation supplementary relatives syntax theory Tour winner translation truth values tuple types for LCI utterance modifiers variable verb Yamada