Abstract
Given that the ten negative sentences in Tables 1.1 and 1.2 each have at least two conventional interpretations, it is natural to suspect that they are semantically ambiguous. We saw in Sect. 1.9, however, that the different interpretations are not due to any lexical ambiguity in the word not nor any ambiguity in the syntactic structure of the sentences. A natural alternative to the semantic ambiguity theory hypothesizes that one of the interpretations is an implicature. We explore implicature theories in this chapter, concluding that the evaluative-implicature denial and litotes contrary interpretations are implicatures, but the other irregular interpretations are not.
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Notes
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When Kay and Michaelis (2012: 2288) cite polarity reversal and failure of morphological incorporation as evidence against implicature theories, I believe they overlook the possibility that generalized conversational implicatures are governed by convention.
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See for example Wilson 1975: 99; Kempson 1975: 142; Grice 1967: 83; 1978: 44–47; Sadock 1981; 258; Wilson and Sperber 1981: 155; Levinson 1983: 97–100, 132; Bach 1987: 69, 77–9; Burton-Roberts 1989: 107ff; Horn 1989: 213–214, 365, 377ff, 383; 1992: 263, 266; Neale 1990: 80–1, 90–1; 1992: 535; DeRose 1999: 197; 2002: 176; Rysiew 2001: 491, 505; 2005: 64–6; Schaffer 2004: 147, 149; Hazlett 2007. Contrast Geurts 1998: 298; Davis 1998: 18–27; 2013.
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See Grice 1975: 31; Levinson 1983: 134–5; Horn 1992b: 260–2; Huang 2014: 31. Griceans sometimes weaken the premise to “It is unlikely that the speaker was observing the Cooperative Principle unless he believed (or implicated) I”; see Bach and Harnish 1979: 92–3; Levinson 1983: 115–6; Leech 1983: 30–44, 153; Rysiew 2000. The same problems arise whether alternative implicatures are supposed to be impossible or improbable.
- 8.
Grice formulates the “general pattern for the working out of a conversational implicature” as follows: “He has said that p; there is no reason to suppose that he is not observing the maxims, or at least the Cooperative Principle; he could not be doing this unless he thought that q; he knows (and knows that I know that he knows) that I can see that the supposition that he thinks that q is required; he has done nothing to stop me thinking that q; he intends me to think, or is at least willing to allow me to think, that q; and so he has implicated that q.” (Grice 1975: 31, my emphasis) The premise I italicized is the determinacy condition. Grice states it earlier on the same page as condition (2) for a man to have conversationally implicated that q by saying that p: “the supposition that he is aware that, or thinks that, q is required in order to make his saying or making as if to say p (or doing so in those terms) consistent with this presumption [that he is observing the Cooperative Principle].”
One problem with Grice’s working-out schema we will ignore here is that ‘S implicated that q’ does not follow from ‘S has to believe q to be cooperative.’ A more direct alternative to Grice’s working out schema would have as its key premise S could not be observing CP unless S implicated that q. Nothing in this section will depend on which formulation of determinacy is used.
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See also Lepore and Stone 2015. They differ in taking the technical term ‘implicature’ to be defined by calculability, rather than indirection (meaning one thing by saying another). So they conclude that there are no implicatures. They present no arguments that speakers do not often mean one thing by saying another.
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Gajewski (2007: 297, 311) and Bošković and Gajewski (2011: 128) assume that believe, and therefore does not believe, presuppose that the subject has an opinion about the embedded clause. But S believes p asserts rather than presupposes that S has a particular opinion as does S does not believe p when it is an NR contrary. When the negative sentence has its compositional interpretation, it simply denies that S has an opinion without assuming in any way that he does have an opinion. No one in the time of Aristotle believed that uranium was radioactive: they had no concept at all of uranium or radioactivity is perfectly consistent and true.
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This example comes from Grice via Wilson 1975: 150. See also Burton-Roberts 1989: 116ff, and Horn 1989: 377ff, 396. (26)(c) is from Burton-Roberts 1999: 362. Note that (26)(a) shows that irregular negations need not conform to Disjunctive Syllogism. Neither the speaker nor the audience would take It will be Heath to follow.
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The maxim of Quality allows all three interpretations too given the way I worded the question, at least if we assume that B knows that he broke both his own and someone else’s finger.
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Levinson’s (2000: 156–7, 161) rule (100) that the Q principle takes priority over the I principle either fails in this case or does not apply. His more qualified rule (99) implies that I takes precedence over Q in this case because ‘his own finger’ and ‘someone else’s finger’ are not as brief and lexicalized as ‘finger’ (cf. Bezuidenhout 2002: 264–5); but (99) also predicts that ‘He broke a finger’ does not implicate ‘He did not break his own finger.’
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Blutner seems to follow Horn in thinking of (ii) (which concerns how something is contributed) as corresponding to Q (which concerns what is contributed).
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See also Wilson and Sperber 1981: 168–71; 2004: 612; Wilson and Sperber 1986: 381–2; 1987: 702–04; 1995: 258, 270; Kempson 1986: 89ff; Carston 1987, 1988: 42–4; Blakemore 1987: 54–71; 1992: 24–37; Yus 2006: 513–4. For critiques by a number of prominent authors, see Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 10, 1987, 697–754. See also Walker 1989; Levinson 1987, 1989; Davis 1998: §3.12; Bach 2010: 136.
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In some places, Sperber and Wilson (1986: 95–6; 1987: 702) try to prevent an infinite set of contextual implications by restricting the rules of inference to “elimination” rules. It is not clear that this effort succeeds (see e.g., Davis 1998: 102). But if it does, it calls into question the importance of “Relevance” so defined. Why would people care about this oddly defined measure?
- 28.
This is one of the paradoxes of infinity. To see the point, note that there are as many integers greater than five as there are greater than four, which is shown by the fact that the two sets can be put in a one-to-one correspondence.
- 29.
See also Wilson and Sperber 1986: 158; 1987: 704; 1995: 270; Carston 1987: 714; 1998a: 336; 2010: 247; Wilson and Sperber 2004: 611. Wilson and Sperber (2004: 614) claim that “there should be no more than one” interpretation with a satisfactory degree of Relevance because “an utterance with two apparently satisfactory competing interpretations would cause the hearer the unnecessary extra effort of choosing between them.” But such extra effort is not unnecessary if, as is usually the case, it is impossible for the speaker to prevent the existence of such competing interpretations.
- 30.
See also Wilson and Sperber 1986: 168–9; 1987: 705; Carston 1998a: 341; 2010: 218; Wilson and Sperber 2004: 613, 626; Yus 2006: 514. Sometimes they say “order of accessibility” rather than “path of least resistance.” Bach’s (2010: 130) gloss is significantly different: “consider hypotheses about what the speaker means in the order in which they occur to you – how else? – and … stop as soon as a sufficiently plausible one comes to mind.” ‘Relevant’ does not mean “plausible.” Note that we often reject what we initially take to be plausible for an interpretation that is more plausible.
- 31.
Relevance theorists sometimes assume that inferring an implicature takes less effort than “decoding” what the speaker said (e.g., Carston 1998a: 337–8). Sometimes they assume the opposite (e.g., Wilson and Sperber 1986: 383). There is no basis for either assumption given our inability to measure processing effort.
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Contrast Atlas 1977: 327, 324.
- 34.
See e.g., Wilson 1975: 99–100, 106; Kempson 1975: 178–9; Atlas 1975; 1979: 273; 1989: 143; Boër and Lycan 1976: 27–8 (but contrast 60–1); Wilson and Sperber 1981: 176, fn. 5; Levinson 1983: 218, 222; Lycan 1984: 84; Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 40–1. Grice’s (1981: 273–6) own derivation was even less successful.
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Carston seems to be assuming a Russellian interpretation of definite descriptions, although she makes no such claim. She does imply that the wide-scope presupposition-canceling interpretation involves “Predicate denial (or sentence negation)” rather than “term (constituent) negation” (cf. Horn 1989: 107, 488; 1990: 496). But it is again hard to see how one can deny the predicate ‘is bald’ of the king of France without presupposing that France has a king.
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This is clearly true in standard logic, in which a contradiction entails every proposition all by itself; hence nothing is entailed by the conjunction of a contradiction and the set of contextual assumptions that is not entailed by either alone. The claim may not be true in a relevance logic.
- 37.
Carston’s claim that the process of reinterpretation might return to the descriptive wide-scope interpretation also appears to contradict her claim in the next paragraph that “The semantic level differs from the two pragmatic levels in that no final interpretation will ever involve it alone....” (1998a: 341; see also 2002: 307) This complements the contradiction in her claim that marked negations are “essentially” but not “absolutely” metalinguistic (echoic, metarepresentational) (1996: 319, 320; 1998a: 335ff, 1999: 380).
Carston (2002: 308–9) says Relevance theory predicts that when the order of the negation and the sequent are reverse, the interpretative process is different. When There is no king of France is processed first, she says, the regular presupposition-preserving interpretation of The king of France is not bald is blocked, so “the utterance is recognized on the first processing pass as an echoic negation.” But why should the hearer arrive at not[“The king of France is bad” is assertable] rather than not[The king of France is bald]?
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Davis, W.A. (2016). Implicature Theories. In: Irregular Negatives, Implicatures, and Idioms. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7546-5_4
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