Griceians on Campus

Traugott:

"With hindsight one can see emerging in Stern’s attempt to characterize
“permutation” as what in Grice’s ([1975] 1989) and Levinson’s (1983)
conceptions came to be known as the conventionalizing of conversational
implicatures.3"

Traugott has developed the Grice/Levinson insight into the Invited
Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change or IITSC (Traugott 1999;
Traugott and Dasher In press; for an earlier version see Traugott and
König 1991).

Traugott mentions only two things about IITSC because
they will be crucial later.

Traugott has extended Geis and Zwicky’s (1971) notion
of “invited inference”, seeing in this term (rather than “implicature”)
the possibility of alluding to both speaker’s strategic action (inviting) and
the hearer’s response (inferencing).

Furthermore, following Levinson
(1995, 2000), Traugott distinguishes between invited inferences that arise “on the
fly” or are not salient in the community (these are Invited Inferences or
IINs), and those that are well established (Generalized Invited Inferences,
or GIINs).

An example of a GIIN is the causative inference from after in
certain contexts; this has been available since Old English. It is not only
stable but well known and usable, but has not yet been semanticized as a
polysemy.