Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Quality as a Speech-Act CI and Presuppositions

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (JSAI-isAI 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11717))

Included in the following conference series:

  • 883 Accesses

Abstract

In this paper, I propose a novel account of Gricean Quality [3] in terms of conventional implicatures (CIs) that speech acts give rise to. This view of Quality as a speech-act CI leads to a novel view of the relation between Quality CIs and CIs arising on the prejacent rather than the speech-act level of utterance meaning, as triggered by expressives and parentheticals [13]. It also sheds light on the interaction of (Quality) CIs and presuppositions, which I take to be properties of propositions. On my view, utterance felicity is determined by both speech-act CIs differing by utterance type and prejacent CIs. Building on Grice’s maxims of Quality, I propose speech-act CIs for three types of utterances differentiated by interrogative vs. assertive force and speaker- vs. addressee-orientation and predict the effect of presuppositions on utterance felicity by their interaction with the use-conditional evaluability of speech-act CIs, and, in some cases, prejacent CIs.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    See Rieser (2017) [15] for more discussion on the role of addressee reasoning in the derivation of conveyed utterance meaning.

  2. 2.

    Ignoring the possible use of either as a derogatory term when referring to a person.

  3. 3.

    For more detailed discussion on the basic idea of Gricean implicatures as CIs see McCready (2015) [12] and Rieser (2017) [15].

  4. 4.

    I am not claiming that when the speaker of an assertion believes the prejacent proposition to be true, but it is in fact false, there is nothing wrong with this assertion. It seems, however, quite clear to me that there is something else wrong when the speaker actually believes the prejacent to be false or has no sufficient grounds to assert it. The latter is the kind of badness (Gricean in spirit) I seek to capture—see Jary (2010) [7] for an overview of alternative views.

  5. 5.

    Here, I show speech-act CIs from Quality only, which are not necessarily the only members of \(U^\mathcal {A}\), but the only ones that matter for the discussion in this paper.

References

  1. Ciardelli, I., Roelofsen, F.: Inquisitive logic. J. Philos. Logic 40(1), 55–94 (2011)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  2. Davis, C.: Constraining interpretation: sentence final particles in Japanese. Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusets, Amherst (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Grice, H.P.: Logic and conversation. In: Cole, P., Morgan, J.L. (eds.) Syntax and Semantics, Speech Acts, vol. 3, pp. 41–58. Academic Press, New York (1975)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Groenendijk, J., Roelofsen, F.: Inquisitive semantics and pragmatics. In: Proceedings of SPR, vol. 9, pp. 41–72 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Gunlogson, C.: True to form: rising and falling declaratives as questions in English. Ph.D. thesis, UCSC (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Gutzmann, D.: Use-Conditional Meaning: Studies in Multidimensional Semantics. Oxford Unviersity Press, Oxford (2015)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  7. Jary, M.: Assertion. Springer, Boston (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230274617

    Book  Google Scholar 

  8. Kaplan, D.: The meaning of ouch and oops. In: Cornell Conference on Context Dependency (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Karttunen, L.: Presupposition: what went wrong? In: Semantics and Linguistic Theory, vol. 26, pp. 705–731 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Karttunen, L., Zaenen, A.: Veridicity. In: Katz, G., Pustejovsky, J., Schilder, F. (eds.) Annotating, Extracting and Reasoning about Time and Events (2005). http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2005/314

  11. Krifka, M.: Bias in commitment space semantics: declarative questions, negated questions, and question tags. In: Proceedings of Semantics and Lingustic Theory (SALT), pp. 328–345 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. McCready, E.: Reliability in Pragmatics. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Potts, C.: The Logic of Conversational Implicatures. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Potts, C.: Presupposition and implicature. In: Lappin, S., Fox, C. (eds.) The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory, vol. 2, pp. 168–202. Wiley (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Rieser, L.: Belief States and Evidence in Speech Acts: The Japanese Sentence Final Particle no. Ph.D. thesis, Kyoto University (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Rieser, Lukas: Truth conditionals and use conditionals: an expressive modal analysis. In: Kurahashi, Setsuya, Ohta, Yuiko, Arai, Sachiyo, Satoh, Ken, Bekki, Daisuke (eds.) JSAI-isAI 2016. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 10247, pp. 108–122. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61572-1_8

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  17. Russell, B.: On denoting. Mind 14(56), 479–493 (1905)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Searle, J.R.: Speech Acts. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1969)

    Book  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Yamagata University, Yamagata, Japan

    Lukas Rieser

Authors
  1. Lukas Rieser
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lukas Rieser .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Ibaraki, Japan

    Kazuhiro Kojima

  2. University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan

    Maki Sakamoto

  3. Ochanomizu University, Tokyo, Japan

    Koji Mineshima

  4. National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan

    Ken Satoh

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Rieser, L. (2019). Quality as a Speech-Act CI and Presuppositions. In: Kojima, K., Sakamoto, M., Mineshima, K., Satoh, K. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11717. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31605-1_29

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31605-1_29

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-31604-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-31605-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation