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Saturday, July 10, 2010

Zwicky implicature

From online:

A. Z. writes:

"In my little posting on visitors coming by with pizza, after which a movie was watched, I observed that this description probably should be taken as conveying three events rather than two: the arrival of the pizza-bearers, the eating of the pizza, and the watching of the movie. This isn’t guaranteed: maybe the visitors brought the pizza because they were going to take it on to some later event, or dispose of it in a garbage dump, or display it as found art, or whatever (no necessary pizza-eating); maybe, as a commenter on that posting said, the pizza was indeed consumed, but during, rather than before, the movie-watching; or maybe the pizza was consumed, but after the movie-watching; or maybe the movie-watching took place after the arrival and the pizza-eating, but long after them (like, say, a week later); and so on. All the original sentence said is that there were two events, the arrival with pizza and the movie-watching, occurring in that order."

"All the rest is everyday reasoning and implicature."

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