This article reviews in detail Grice’s conception of
conversational implicature, then surveys the major literature on scalar
implicature from early work to the present. Embedded implicature is
illustrated, and it is explained why this phenomenon poses a challenge to the
Gricean view. Some alternate views of conversational implicature are then
presented. The article concludes with a brief look at formal appraches to the
study of implicature.
1. Introduction
Conversational implicature is the phenomenon whereby a speaker
says one thing and thereby conveys (typically, in addition) something else. For
example, in (1) below, Harold says
that Sally should bring her umbrella, but further conveys that (he believes
that) it is likely to rain. This is a standard case of the phenomenon under
examination.
Harold: You should
bring your umbrella.
Conversational implicature was identified and named by the
philosopher Paul Grice in his paper Logic
and Conversation, originally presented at Harvard in 1969. Much of today’s
linguistic pragmatics has its origins in the insights of that paper, and
concerns itself in some fashion with some aspect of conversational implicature.
2. The Gricean conception of conversational implicature
2.1. Implicature as part of what is
meant
For Grice, what a speaker means
by an utterance is the total content which she thereby intends to
communicate (see also article 2 Meaning, Intentionality and Communication
and article 5 Meaning in Use). One component of what is meant is what is said: roughly, the truth conditional content linguistically encoded
in the utterance. The remainder – what is meant but not said – is what Grice
calls implicature. Implicature itself
subdivides into two major categories: conventional and conversational.
Conventional implicature is content which is conventionally encoded but
non-truth-conditional (cf. article 106 Conventional Implicature). In
this article, we will be concerned with conversational
implicature: implicatures that arise by virtue of general principles
governing linguistic behavior. In “Logic and Conversation” (Grice 1975:
henceforward, L&C) and “Further
Notes on Logic and Conversation” (Grice 1978: hence, FN), Grice introduces the phenomenon of conversational implicature
and lays out the principles which allow speakers to systematically mean more
than they say.
2.2. The Theory of Conversational
Implicature
To account for the phenomenon of conversational implicature,
Grice proposes that there are certain norms of conversational behavior, norms
which are mutually known and typically adhered to by conversational
participants. These norms prevent conversation from consisting of “a succession
of disconnected remarks,” and, at each stage in a conversation, render certain
possible conversational contributions “unsuitable” (L&C 26). Grice summarizes the effect of these norms as a single
overarching principle, which he calls the Cooperative Principle:
Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at
the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk
exchange in which you are engaged.
This principle has little force without further clarification
of what is in fact required of conversational contributions. Grice specifies
this further in what he calls Maxims of
Conversation, formulated as rules governing allowable conversational moves.
Grice organizes these maxims into four categories: Quality, Quantity, Relation
and Manner. In current usage, these terms are used to designate the specific
maxims Grice proposed. Grice himself, however, gives these specifically as categories of maxims “under one or
another of which will fall certain more specific maxims and submaxims” (p.26),
apparently envisaging the possibility of substantial lists of conversational
rules. The maxims which Grice proposes are listed below, in some cases slightly
reformulated from the original:
Conversational Maxims
Quality
Supermaxim: Try to make your contribution one that is true
1. Do not say what you believe to be false.
2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate
evidence.
Quantity
1. Make your contribution as informative as is
required (for the current purposes of the exchange).
2. Do not make your contribution more
informative than is required.
Relation
Be
relevant
Manner
Supermaxim:
Be perspicuous
1. Avoid obscurity of expression
2. Avoid ambiguity
3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity)
4. Be orderly
The view that
conversation is a norm-governed activity provides the basis for Grice’s account of how conversational implicatures
arise. The general structure of the account is this: There is a standing
presumption that speakers produce utterances which are in accord with the
Cooperative Principle and its maxims. Interpreters will assign to an utterance
an interpretation in accord with this presumption. In some cases, this will
require the interpreter to attribute to the speaker the intention to
communicate something more than, or different from, what she has actually said.
In identifying what the speaker intends, the interpreter will rely on three
things: first, her observation about what the speaker said (i.e. the truth conditional content expressed) and the form in
which it was expressed; second, the
presumption of cooperativity; and third, any world knowledge that might be
relevant. Speakers can anticipate this behavior of interpreters, and thus can
predict that particular utterances will be understood as conveying something
more than or different from what is literally said. The fact that it is common
knowledge that the CP is in effect thus allows speakers to implicate, and
interpreters to identify implicatures.
Grice characterizes
conversational implicature in the following way (slightly simplified from the
original):
A man who, by saying ... that p has implicated that q,
may be said to have conversationally implicated that q, provided that:
1. he is to be presumed to be observing the
conversational maxims or at least the Cooperative Principle
2. the supposition that he thinks that q is required in order to make his
saying p (or doing so in those terms) consistent with this
presumption and
3. the speaker thinks (and would expect the
hearer to think that the speaker thinks) that it is within the competence of
the hearer to work out, or grasp intuitively, that the supposition mentioned in
2. is required.
Grice’s presumption here is that such suppositions of the
speaker, when recognized by the hearer, will be understood to be meant.
Clause 2 of this
definition is quite problematic, as it makes it a condition on implicature that
the implicature (the “required supposition”) be uniquely adequate to maintain
the presumption of cooperativity. This is typically too strong: in almost any
case of conversational implicature, there are multiple candidate suppositions,
any of which might render the utterance cooperative. This point is noted by
Grice (see the final paragraph of L&C).
Davis
Let’s now
make things clearer by examining some specific cases. Consider again the sample
discourse from above, repeated here as (2):
Harold: You should
bring your umbrella.
Observation: Sally is likely to conclude that Harold means to
inform her that it is likely to rain. How so? First, Sally presumes that Harold
is speaking in accord with the CP. Among other things, this means that she
presumes that he intends his answer to be relevant. Now, strictly speaking,
Harold’s instruction is not an answer to the question Sally has asked: it says
nothing about the weather. But because
of her presumption, Sally presumes that what Harold says is relevant in some way to her question. It immediately occurs to
her that one uses an umbrella when it rains; and that Harold is likely to tell
her to bring an umbrella if he believes that it is going to rain. If she
attributes this belief to Harold, and assumes that he intends, via his
utterance, to communicate this belief to her, then she has successfully
interpreted his utterance in a way which renders his behavior consistent with
her presumption of his cooperativity. As Harold can, moreover, plausibly assume
that Sally will reason in this way, he implicates that (he believes that) it is
going to rain.
Note that this case
illustrates the failure of the uniqueness condition on implicature (Clause 2 of
the definition above). Suppose it is common knowledge between Sally and Harold
that Sally uses her umbrella as a sunshade when the weather is hot. Then Sally
might just as well have attributed to Harold the belief that it would be hot
and sunny, and take him to intend to communicate this. So there are (at least)
two candidate suppositions that would render Harold’s utterance cooperative. On
the other hand, contextual factors (such as the interlocutors’ common knowledge
of recent weather) might well render one of these suppositions far more likely
or reasonable. This line of thought might offer a resolution of the difficulty.
The example in (2) involves a Relevance implicature. Implicatures can be
generated via any of the maxims (or combinations thereof). Here is one which
relies on the first Maxim of Quantity:
Sally: Mrs. Smith and Mr. Jones.
Here, Sally implicates that Mrs. Smith and Mr. Jones were the only teachers that she talked to. This
is by virtue of the first maxim of quantity. Given the assumption that Sally is
abiding by this maxim, Harold must assume that she will provide all the
information relevant to his question. If (she believed that) she had talked to
additional teachers, then it would constitute a violation of the maxim to fail
to mention them. So, to maintain the premise that Sally is abiding by the maxim, Harold must assume that Sally (believes
that she) spoke to no other teachers. As Sally, moreover, can assume that
Harold will recognize the required assumption, she implicates that she talked
to no other of Bobby’s teachers.
2.2.1. Characteristics of conversational implicature
In the final pages of L&C,
Grice identifies certain characteristic features of conversational
implicatures. The central ones are these:
1. Calculability: if
some element of content is a conversational implicature, then it should be
possible to provide an account of how it is calculated on the basis of what is
said plus the maxims.
2. Nondetachability: On
Grice’s view, implicatures other than Manner implicatures are calculated on the
basis of what is said – roughly, on the basis of the truth conditional content
expressed. Hence, other ways of expressing the same truth conditional content
in the given context should give rise to the same implicature. That is,
implicatures are nondetachable from a
particular truth conditional content.
3. Cancelability (of
generalized conversational implicature): Because conversational implicatures
are not part of the encoded or conventional content of any linguistic item, and
because their presence is dependent on (more or less) specific assumptions,
including the assumption of the cooperativity of the speaker, then it should be
possible for an expected implicature to be contextually canceled.
These features,
particularly cancelability, are sometimes taken as diagnostics of
conversational implicature. However, Grice did not intend them this way, as he
clarifies in FN (p.43). Sadock (1976)
provides thorough arguments showing that none of these features, either
separately or together, can serve as robust diagnostics of conversational
implicature, as none are either necessary or sufficient conditions. The
arguments are too lengthy to rehearse here in detail, but a couple of points
are worth mentioning. With respect to
calculability, Grice and Sadock agree that it is not sufficient to establish
the presence of a conversational implicature, because what starts life as a
conversational implicature may become conventionalized. Nondetachability is
neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition. It is not necessary, because it
is not a feature of Manner implicatures. It is not sufficient for the
identification of conversational implicatures, because it is also a feature of
entailments.
Sadock gives a
second argument against the necessity of nondetachability, observing that there
are cases of truth conditionally equivalent sentences whose utterance does not
give rise to the same implicatures. Consider sentences (4) and (5) as answers to the question: Did you eat any of the cake?
Obviously, (4) implicates that the speaker did not eat all of the cake,
while (5) just as obviously does not so implicate. Yet the two
sentences (by assumption) have the same truth conditional content i.e. in both
cases the same thing is said. Hence, the implicature is not nondetachable: utterances of
truth conditionally identical S and S’ do not both produce the implicature.
One possible
response to this argument is simply that the definition of nondetachability
requires refinement: it should exclude candidates which are truth conditionally
equivalent to the original but include an explicit denial of the potential
implicature. Other reformulations of (4) do preserve the implicature. Consider I ate part of the
cake or I ate a bit of the cake.
A second response is that the input to conversational
implicature calculation is not simple truth conditional content, but some more
structured entity. Arguments for this position are given by Gazdar (1979) and
Atlas & Levinson (1981).
Finally, we turn to
cancelability. First, note that the type of cancelability Grice has in mind
involves the speaker being explicit that she is opting out of the observation
of the CP, or the context being one which makes clear that the speaker is
opting out. In FN, he gives the
example of a speaker who is giving a clue in the course of a treasure hunt
saying:
(6)
The prize is either in the garden or the attic, but I’m not
telling you which.
In this context, the typical implication from a disjunction,
that the speaker does not know which disjunct is true, is suppressed.
Sadock discusses a
different type of cancelation, where the speaker explicitly denies the usual
implicature, as in:
In the current literature, when people discuss implicature
cancelation, the latter is usually what is intended.
Grice seems to
consider that cancelability can only apply to generalized conversational implicatures. What he seems to have in
mind is that we make observations about what is normally or typically
implicated by the use of a particular expression, and compare it with what (if anything) is actually implicated by the
use of that expression in some specific situation. We clearly cannot make the
same sort of comparison in the case of particularized
implicatures. For example, no-one would claim that the sentence I have to cook dinner normally or
typically implicates I am not going to
read you a story, but certainly an utterance of that sentence might well so
implicate if I say it in response to my six year old’s request in easily
imaginable circumstances. Nonetheless, we sometimes find cases like these:
M: I have to cook dinner. So if I read to you
now, will you play by yourself for a while afterwards, so I can get dinner
done?
The first sentence, if uttered alone in this context, might
well be used to implicate “no.” The entire string, however, makes clear that
this is intended to launch a “yes, but...” response. So, there is some
temptation to say that the second sentence cancels the implicature arising from
the first. This is similar to a second way of understanding implicature
cancelation in the generalized case. In cases like (12), one might say that the use of the first clause does generate the implicature, but that
the implicature is canceled – that is, the initial clause is reinterpreted – in
light of the content of the second.
Which way we should
see it depends in part on our assumptions about when implicature calculation
takes place. It is clear that Grice assumes throughout most of his writing on
the subject that the input is at least a complete proposition. The examples
used typically involve a single sentence generating an implicature. But it is
perfectly consistent with the Gricean model that the semantic content of a
multi-sentence conversational contribution – presumed to be several
propositions – could be the basis for a process of implicature calculation. If
implicatures are calculated in this way, example (12) could only be said to involve cancelation in the sense that
an implicature that typically arises fails to do so; and in the case of (13) it would not be sensible to talk about cancelation at all.
Cancelability
remains an important diagnostic for distinguishing between conventional content
and inferred content (although see again Sadock’s arguments concerning
ambiguity). However, it is important, in making use of this notion, to be clear
just what we mean by it in any particular case.
2.2.2. Subtypes of conversational implicature
The Quantity implicature in (3) above straightforwardly fits Grice’s own characterization of
conversational implicature. But the Relevance implicature in (2) fits it rather awkwardly. Although I formulated it this way
above, it is somewhat odd to say that Sally recognizes that Harold presumes that it will rain, and
therefore takes him to intend to communicate this. It seems more natural to say
that Sally recognizes that Harold presumes
that she would want to have her umbrella with her if it rains, and thus infers,
from his recommendation that she bring her umbrella, his intention to
communicate that it might rain. Let’s call the identified presumption a background implicature, and the
communicated proposition, that it might rain, a foreground implicature.
Sally’s recognition
of the background implicature seems to make use of standard Gricean reasoning:
searching for a way to interpret Harold’s utterance as cooperative, she looks
for a presumption he might be making which would render what he said relevant
to her question. However, the background implicature is nonetheless not a true
implicature in Grice’s sense; for recall that for Grice, implicature is a
subcategory of speaker meaning; and what a speaker means is what he intends to
communicate. In the kind of conversation we are imagining between Sally and
Harold, it would not typically be Harold’s intention to communicate that Sally
likes to have her umbrella with her when it rains.
Here we reach the
first of many choice points, where we will have to decide: is our goal to
follow Grice’s conception as closely as possible? Or to use his proposal as a
jumping off point from which to develop an empirically adequate and explanatory
theory of pragmatics? For linguists, the answer is typically the latter. As a
first departure from Grice, we might propose using the term conversational implicature for any
inference the speaker intends the addressee to make on the basis of the
assumption that he is being cooperative. The distinction made above between
background and foreground implicature can be further explicated by
distinguishing between implicatures which are not meant (in Grice’s sense) and
those that are. (For further discussion, and identification of background
implicatures with presuppositions, see Simons 2004, 2008.)
One additional
Gricean distinction remains to be made: that between particularized and generalized
conversational implicature. Example (2) involves a particularized implicature. Here the implicature
relies to a high degree on the conversational context and on specific
background assumptions attributed to the interlocutors. Changes in the context
or in these assumptions easily change the implicature or eliminate it. For
example, if Harold had uttered the same sentence in a conversation in which the
interlocutors we trying to figure out how to knock a ball out of a tree, it
would give rise to no implicatures at all about the weather. There is thus “no
room for the idea” (to use Grice’s phrase) that the implicature is associated
with this particular form of words or with the expression of this content.
In contrast, in the
case of Generalized Conversational Implicatures, exactly this claim is
warranted. GCIs are implicatures which normally arise when a particular form of
words is used. The only example Grice gives of a GCI in L&C involves the interpretation of indefinite NPs, which turns
out to be a rather complex case. In FN,
he discusses the implicature associated with the use of or that the speaker does not know which disjunct is true. Grice
notes that “noncontroversial examples [of GCIs] are perhaps hard to find, since
it is all too easy to treat a generalized conversational implicature as if it
were a conventional implicature” (L&C,
p.37).
In the post-Gricean
literature, an element of content is identified as a GCI if, on the one hand,
it can be explained as a Gricean implicature and is cancelable; but, on the
other hand, its occurrence is not dependent on irregular features of context,
but only on the basic assumption that the speaker is speaking in accord with
the CP. Some authors deny that there is
any theoretically significant distinction between generalized and
particularized implicatures (e.g. Hirschberg 1991); while others hold the
opposite view (see Levinson 2000, discussed below in section 5).
Presuppositions are also considered by some authors to be a
subtype of implicature, although this view is far from widespread. The bulk of
linguistic work on presupposition since the 1970's has focused on the
projection problem: assuming the association of presuppositions with particular
atomic sentences, how do we account properly for the presuppositions of complex
sentences in which the atomic sentences are embedded? The possible relationship
between implicature and presupposition becomes salient when we focus on a
different question, namely, how do presuppositions arise in the first place?
Many authors have suggested that some or all presuppositions arise via the
workings of Gricean conversational principles: see among others Stalnaker 1974,
Kempson 1975, Wilson 1975, Boër & Lycan 1976, Atlas 1977, 1978, 2005,
Atlas & Levinson 1981, Grice 1981, Simons 2001, 2004. The idea underlying
all of these proposals is formulated succinctly by Stalnaker: “one can explain
many presupposition constraints in terms of general conversational rules
without buildijng anything about presuppositions into the meanings of
particular words or constructions” (1974: 212). For a discussion of this issue
in the broader context of the literature on presupposition, see Article 102.
22.3. Rational underpinnings of the
Maxims
After laying out the CP and the maxims in L&C, Grice raises “a fundamental question about the Cooperative
Principle and its attendant maxims, namely, what the basis is for the
assumption which we seem to make, that talkers will in general ... proceed in
the manner that these principles prescribe” (p.28). He goes on to say: “ I
would like to be able to think of the standard type of conversational practice
... as something that it is reasonable
for us to follow,” and sets out the following as a set of claims to be
explored:
1. There are certain goals that are fundamental
to conversational exchange.
2. These goals can be
accomplished only in conversational exchanges conducted in accordance with the
CP.,
3. Therefore rational speakers will behave in
accord with the CP.
Claim 2 in this list seems unnecessarily strong. We might do
better with 2':
2'. These goals can be best accomplished (i.e.
most efficiently, with least effort of both speaker and hearer) in conversational exchanges conducted in
accordance with the CP.
As part of the effort to establish these rationalist
foundations for the account, Grice demonstrates that each of the Maxims has an
analog in the non-linguistic domain, in other types of goal-oriented
interactions. The effort, however, does not go much beyond this, and Grice leaves
as an open question whether his conversational principles can be independently
motivated. But this proposal sets a particular foundational project for
pragmatics, namely, to determine the rational underpinnings of pragmatic
principles.
Perhaps because of
the label Cooperative Principle, it
is standard to suppose that observation of the CP and maxims is tied to a
certain amount of explicit cooperativity between the discourse participants.
What is clearly not required is alignment of practical goals: Grice was clear
that the CP must be construed as in effect even in cases like quarreling. The
degree of cooperativity envisioned by Grice seems to go no further than a
mutual desire on the part of the interlocutors to use language in a way that
facilitates communication between them.
Nonetheless, there
are some difficult cases: what account is to be given of apparent implicatures
in cases where the misaligned goals of interlocutors should lead them to expect
their discourse partners to be, for example, intentionally underinformative?
(For discussion within a game theoretic framework, see Franke, de Jager &
van Rooij 2008.) Both empirical and theoretical questions concerning such
issues remain open.
2.4. A friendly amendment: Horn’s Q-
and R- principles
As noted, Grice seems to envision a long, open ended list of
specific submaxims falling under each of his four categories. Horn (1984)
develops Grice’s view in a different direction. Setting aside Quality as having
a special status, Horn proposes a reduction of the remaining Gricean principles
to just two: Q (“to evoke Quantity”) and R (Relation).
Horn’s Principles
(Q) Make your contribution sufficient; say as
much as you can (given R).
(R) Make your
contribution necessary; say no more than you must (given Q).
The Q-principle corresponds to the first maxim of Quantity. R
is intended to encompass Relation, the second maxim of Quantity, and Manner.
The precise wording
of the principles is perhaps less important than the underlying idea, which
Horn attributes to Zipf (1949) and Martinet (1962). The idea is that there are
two basic and conflicting forces at work in the linguistic domain, representing
the interests of the speaker and the distinct interests of the hearer. It is in
the interest of the hearer/interpreter to receive maximum (relevant)
information and to receive it in the clearest formulation available. The
Q-principle encapsulates this as a hearer-oriented requirement imposed on the
speaker. However, it is in the interest of the speaker to minimise the effort
involved in producing her message; this interest underlies the R principle.
Horn emphasizes two
points: first, that his two principles together do the work of Grice’s
categories of Quantity, Relation and Manner; second, that the two principles
are in conflict. This latter observation provides the basis of an explanation
of certain cases of miscommunication, where different parties may be exploiting
or emphasizing different principles. But it also raises an empirical question,
namely, in cases of successful communication involving implicature, on what
grounds do speakers/hearers determine which principle takes precedence?
Consider for example the following cases discussed by Horn:
At issue is the natural interpretation of the indefinite. We
are inclined to understand the speaker of (14) as saying that she broke one of her own fingers. This would
be, in Horn’s view, an application of the R-principle: what is meant is
something informationally richer than what is said; the speaker has provided
the minimum information necessary to convey the total intended message. In
contrast, it is natural to understand the speaker of (15) as saying that she slept on a boat not belonging to her.
This, Horn takes to involve an application of the Q-principle: as the speaker
has provided no more specific information about the boat, we take it that no
additional information is available or relevant. (It is not entirely
transparent how the principles are to apply in each case to produce the
specific interpretations. What is important here is that interpretation goes in
two different directions with two superficially similar sentences.)
Horn’s brief
discussion suggests that there may be many different, and differently weighted,
considerations involved in resolving a maxim-clash. The considerations may be
specific to the construction involved, and hence it is likely that there is no
global answer to the question of which maxim or principle applies; the question
may well require a case-by-case answer.
The problem of clashes
between maxims had received prior attention in Atlas & Levinson (1981).
They offer a Principle of Informativeness to account for example (14) and a host of additional cases where the speaker is
understood as conveying something more specific than what is literally said,
noting that in many cases, a conflict exists between this principle and Grice’s
maxim of Quantity.
3. A case study: scalar implicature
So far, we have reviewed Grice’s foundational proposal and
some proposed extensions. In this section, we look in detail at one particular
linguistic phenomenon – scalar implicature – which has commonly been analyzed
in Gricean terms.
3.1. The basic phenomenon and the
Gricean account
The following are standard examples of scalar implicature. In
each case, the b. sentence represents an implication that would normally arise
if the a. sentence was uttered in ordinary discourse:
b. It is not the case that more than some of my
friends are Jewish.
b. Their new house is not enormous.
b. It’s not probable that I’ll get funding for
next year.
That the content of the b. sentences is an implication and not
an entailment can be demonstrated by the possibility of cancelation, as in:
(14)
Some of my friends are
Jewish; in fact, most of them are.
(15)
Their new house is large; indeed,
it’s enormous.
We will assume for now without argument that these
implications are implicatures.
The implicatures in
question are clearly generalized, not particularized. This is evident, first,
from the fact that we can identify them in the absence of any particular
information about a context of utterance. Second, the implicatures seem to
arise by virtue of the presence of particular expressions, or at least,
expressions with particular content: some,
large and possible. It does indeed seem that it is the content that is
relevant and not the particular lexical item: the same implicatures would arise
from utterances of the sentences below:
(16)
A few of my friends are Jewish.
(17)
Their new house is big.
(18)
I might get funding for next year.
These implicatures are amenable to what seems a very
straightforward Gricean explanation, based on the first Maxim of Quantity.
Recall that this Maxim says:
Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the
current purposes of the exchange).
It is crucial for the analysis we are about to give to
remember that Quantity is circumscribed not only by Relevance but also by
Quality: while you should give all the information that is required, you should
only give reliable information.
Now, consider a
speaker who utters (16)a. Assume that it is relevant to the current conversation
roughly what proportion of her friends are Jewish. Then Quantity1 enjoins her
to be fully informative with respect to this question.
One natural way
(although by no means the only way) to quantify informativity is in terms of
entailment: If p entails q, then p is more informative than q.
Now consider again the speaker who utters (16)a., and assume that she is being fully informative in the
sense just described. With respect to the (presumed) question at hand, her
utterance rules out the possibility that none of her friends are Jewish, but
leaves open the possibility that some, many, most or all of her friends
are. She could have ruled out these
possibilities by making a more informative statement, e.g. by saying:
But we presume that the speaker has made the most informative
utterance she can given the requirements of Quality. So this leads to the
conclusion that she is not in a position to utter any of the variants of (24). But she is presumably in a position to know (more or less)
what proportion of her friends are Jewish. Therefore, we conclude further that
she is not in a position to make the stronger assertions because they are not
true. That is, we conclude that (16)a. was the most informative true sentence the speaker could
utter relative to the question at hand, and thus conclude from the utterance
that some of the speaker’s friends are Jewish, and no more than some are.
Parallel
derivations can be given for the implicatures in (17) and (18). In each case, the implicature is the negation of a sentence
(proposition) which entails (i.e. is informationally stronger than) the actual
utterance. The negated proposition in each case represents a stronger
alternative which (in some sense) the speaker “could have said” instead of what
she actually said.
3.2. The scalar solution
In the account just sketched, I carefully avoided any
reference to the presence of particular expressions. The account makes
reference only to propositions ordered by entailment. But it is not really
feasible to maintain so pure an account. Reference to expressions seems
necessary to identify the alternative “possible utterances” relative to which
these implicatures are calculated. For there are of course all sorts of other,
stronger utterances which the speaker could have made whose content is
potentially relevant to the same conversation. The speaker of (16)a. could have said:
(20)
Some of my friends are Jewish and they eat kosher.
(21)
Some of my friends are Jewish and some of my friends are Muslim.
or any of an infinity of other possibilities.
In fact, there are
imaginable conversational contexts in which utterance of (16)a. would implicate
the negation of some such other stronger sentence. For example, suppose that (16)a. were uttered in
response to the question:
(22)
Do you know anyone who isn’t a Christian?
In this context, utterance of (16)a. would plausibly give rise to the implicature that the
speaker has no friends who are neither Christian nor Jewish e.g. has no Muslim
friends; and this could be explained by reference to the speaker’s failure to
utter this particular stronger alternative to her actual utterance. So it is
not that random stronger alternatives do not give rise to implicatures based on
the same kind of reasoning. Rather, they only do so when licensed by special
features of the context, that is, they are particularized implicatures. What
this tells us is that to fully explain the cases in (16)-(18), we need to say what allows for a context independent judgment about the relevant
alternatives.
The solution
offered by Horn (1972), now the standard account, invokes the notion of a
scalar term. These are terms which cluster with other semantically related
terms on a scale of informational strength, with relative informativity being
measured, as above, in terms of entailment relations. The standard
formalization of such Horn scales comes from Gazdar (1979): If Q is a Horn
scale of form <α1, α2, α3...αn>,
then each element in Q is logically weaker than any element to its left in the
following sense: given a pair of sentences S, S’ identical except that where S
contains αi, S’ contains αj and i>j, then, if αi/αj
are not embedded under any operator, S entails S’. Let’s call the relation
between elements in such a scale asymmetric
lexical entailment.
The basic
Horn/Gazdar account of generalized scalar implicatures then runs like this:
Utterance of a sentence containing an element in a Horn scale renders salient
the set of stronger scalar alternatives to the original utterance (i.e. for the
unembedded case, sentences identical to the original but with the scalar term
replaced by a scale-mate to its left in the scale), regardless of the
particular conversational context. A Quantity-based inference generates scalar
implicatures based on these alternatives.
We’ll see shortly
that entailment-based scales do not give us a complete account of scalar
implicature. But first, let’s review two questions that arise even given this
fairly simple model. First question: how many implicatures do scales generate?
For example, given the scale <all,
most, many, some>, does utterance of sentence S containing some implicate the negations of all of
the scalar alternatives to S based on this scale? Does it implicate just the
negation of the next strongest, which in turn entails the negations of the
remainder? Does it implicate just the strongest? Hirschberg 1985 argues that
the answer may depend on the context. Consider for example the pair of
discourses below:
(23)
a. A: Are all mushrooms poisonous?
B: Some are.
b. A: Are
many mushrooms poisonous?
B: Some are.
Each question makes salient a different sub-part of the
relevant scale, changing the implicature generated.
A second question
raised by scalar implicatures concerns what Hirschberg calls their epistemic
force. (In fact this question arises for all cases of Quantity implicature, but
has been discussed in particular in the context of scalar implicatures.). This
issue is discussed in almost all of the early research on scalar implicature
(Horn 1972, 1989, Gazdar 1979, Hirschberg 1985; see also Soames 1982: 455-6,
Levinson 1983: 135, Groenendijk & Stokhof 1984, Sauerland 2004). Soames,
Horn (1989) and Sauerland each adopt more or less the following position:
Consider again example (16)a. above. The Maxim of Quantity, bounded as it is by the maxim
of Quality, supports only the weak inference that the speaker does not know
any stronger assertion to be true. However, in some cases, like that of (16)a., we can assume that the speaker has complete knowledge of
the situation she is describing. In such cases, the weak inference supported by
the Maxim can be strengthened: the interpreter can infer that the speaker knows
the stronger alternative not to be true. In our example, the interpreter
can infer that the speaker knows that it is not the case that many, most or all
of her friends are Jewish. Then, by the factivity of knowledge, it is
inferrable that it is not the case that many, most or all of her friends are
Jewish.
This Gricean
predication does not, though, quite match up to intuition. Weak scalar
implicatures are rather unusual, typically arising only when the speaker has
explicitly acknowledged the incompleteness of her information, as in:
(24)
I’ve only looked at a few pages of the manuscript, but I can already
tell you that some of the pages require corrections.
It is much more typical for scalar implicatures to be
epistemically unmodified, even in circumstances where, on reflection, the
interpreter might have less than complete confidence in the speaker’s authority
or evidence. (For more detailed discussion of this topic, see Sauerland 2004
and van Rooij & Schultz 2004.)
Now we come to two
questions much more central to the notion of scale. The first: what precisely
are the elements of the scale? The discussion so far suggests that scales
consist of lexical items. But Gazdar (1979) proposes that the elements should
be semantic values or expressions in a formal language used to represent the
semantic content of sentences. Gazdar argues for this on the basis of
simplicity: For one thing, a language might contain multiple lexical items with
similar content (e.g. large and big) which occupy the same location in a
scale (e.g. relative to huge).
The second core
question raised by scales themselves is this: Where do scales come from? Or
where do they reside? The ideal answer (from a Gricean perspective) would be
that scales are merely a formal construct capturing relations between lexical
items (or semantic values of items) which are fully reconstructible just on the
basis of lexical content. That is, we do not need to stipulate that, for
example, <all, most, many, some>
is a scale, and a language user does not need to learn that it is. Any speaker
who knows the meanings of these terms will recognize that they form a scale by
virtue of the lexical entailment relations which hold between them.
But additional
observations have led many to conclude that such an answer is not available.
The additional observation is that not every entailment scale is a Horn scale
i.e. a scale supporting scalar implicature. Gazdar (1979) gives a simple
example to illustrate this: regret
asymmetrically entails know, but use
of know does not implicate not regret. The example shows that
asymmetric lexical entailment is not a sufficient property to qualify a pair of
words (or their meanings) as Horn scale-mates.
There is a second
type of case where asymmetric lexical entailment is insufficient for Horn scale
membership, giving rise to what has recently been dubbed the Symmetry Problem.
Consider the pair: some but not all, some.
The first asymmetrically entails the latter; but clearly, an utterance of (30)a. does not implicate (30)b.:
b. It is not the case that I ate some but not all
of the cookies
for the conjunction of a. and b. is equivalent to “I ate all
of the cookies” – and this is the negation of what (30)a. is actually observed to implicate!
Horn (1972) addresses
problem cases of this sort by positing a requirement that elements in scales
have the same degree of lexicalization. As English contains no single word
which means “some but not all,” the semantic content of this expression cannot
be a scale-mate with the content of some.
This constraint can perhaps be given a Gricean motivation in terms of the Maxim
of Manner, the idea being that the alternatives to be considered should only be
those which do not increase the complexity of the utterance. (See also
Matsumoto 1995, Katzir 2007.)
In light of these
difficulties, many researchers adopt the position that Horn scales are
linguistically given. So, although we can make certain general observations
about the relations which hold between members of a Horn scale, we cannot
predict merely on the basis of the linguistic properties of an item whether or
not it will occur on a scale, or what its scale-mates will be. It is simply a
contingent fact about a language what scales it contains, and what the members
of those scales are.
3.3. Beyond scales
So, we reach the following position: We posit Horn scales as
linguistic elements. Because of the existence of these scales, an utterance U
of sentence S containing a scalar term makes salient a set of alternative
sentences. We can then apply basic Gricean reasoning utilizing Quantity1 to
give an account of scalar implicatures.
But that basic
Gricean reasoning relied on cashing out informativity in terms of asymmetric
entailment. Yet there appear to be cases of scalar implicature which don’t rely
on scales ordered by this relation. Horn (1989) observes several cases where
lexical items within a particular domain are intuitively rankable (to borrow a
term from Hirschberg 1985), but are not related by lexical entailment. Horn’s
examples include military rank (private,
corporal, sergeant...), life stages (newborn,
infant, toddler, preschooler...), and legal violations (tort, misdemeanor, felony, capital crime).
These, Horn suggests, give rise to implicatures following the same pattern as
entailment based scalar implicatures, as illustrated by the examples below:
(26)
A: Do they have any
pre-schoolers in the program?
B: They have toddlers. [↝
toddlers but no older pre-schoolers]
(27)
A: Have you worked on any
capital cases?
B: I’ve worked on several felony cases. [↝ felony
cases but no capital cases]
Hirschberg (1985) goes further in her observations. She points
out that scalar implicature-like phenomena arise with a variety of non-linear
rankings including whole/part relationships, type/subtype, and prerequisite
orderings. Examples of implicatures based on these relations (all borrowed from
Hirschberg Ch.5) are given below:
(28)
A: Did you read that section I
gave you?
B: I read the first few pages.
(29)
A: Do you have a pet?
B: We have a turtle.
(30)
A: Is she married?
B: She’s engaged.
Similarly, scalar implicatures can be produced where context
makes salient some set of alternatives. Here, affirmation of one alternative
gives rise to an implicature that no other alternative can be affirmed. So
consider:
(31)
A: Do you have apple juice?
B: I have grape or tomato or bloody mary mix.
On the basis of such observations, Hirschberg (p.125)
concludes that scalar implicatures are supported by the class of partially
ordered sets i.e. any relation which is
reflexive, antisymmetric and transitive. Any set of lexical items referring to
entities or processes which stand in such a relation may provide the basis for
a scalar implicature.
In order for a
scalar implicature to be generated, the ordering which underlies it must be
somehow salient. But context can render all kinds of ad-hoc orderings salient,
given adequate background. If the Hirschberg-type examples really are cases of
scalar implicature, then an account of this phenomenon in terms of
conventional, linguistically pre-given scales seems highly implausible. On the
other hand, one might argue that these examples are simply cases of
particularized quantity implicatures, whose explanation requires reference to
the conversational context and goals.
What makes it unlikely
that the Hirschberg-type cases are unrelated to standard cases of generalized
scalar implicature is that both cases clearly involve the construction of
alternative possible utterances. It seems likely that an account of the
construction or identification of the alternatives in these context dependent
cases will be extendable to the classic scalar cases.
A promising
candidate for a more general account comes from work on exhaustivity,
originating in Groenendijk & Stokhof (1984). These authors were concerned
with the derivation of exhaustive answers to questions, as in the following
case:
(32)
A: Which students were late
today?
B: Francine was late.
It is natural to understand the question as requiring, and the
response as providing, an exhaustive answer. That is, the response is taken as
indicating that, of the relevant set of students, only Francine was late (for the event in question). The example is
much like many of Hirschberg’s, which typically involve question/answer pairs,
and could similarly be accounted for on the basis of Quantity. Groenendijk &
Stokhof, however, take exhaustification to be a semantic effect, the result of
applying to the semantic content of the answer an exhaustivization operator,
roughly equivalent to only in
meaning. This account nonetheless
requires, like Hirschberg’s, positing a salient set of students who are
potential alternatives to Francine.
G&S’s proposal
is extended and applied directly to the scalar case in van Rooij & Schulz (2004) and Schulz &
van Rooij (2006). The latter paper offers several revisions to G&S’s
original formalization of the semantics of exhaustivization, extending the
scope of the account and improving on some of the original predictions. More
importantly for our interests, Schulz & van Rooij attempt to derive
exhaustivization explicitly as a Gricean effect, and explicitly connect exhaustivity
to scalar implicature, suggesting (p.245) that many scalar implicatures simply
involve exhaustive interpretation. By extension, this suggests that the notion
of scale may be dispensible for a large class of cases.
For Groenendijk &
Stokhof, exhaustivization is a semantic effect. For Schulz & van Rooij, it
is a pragmatic one. Fox (2007) argues for exhaustivization as a syntactic
effect, resulting from the interpretation of a covert syntactic element. In
terms of its interpretation, Fox’s exh
operator is essentially the same as G&S’s, although its occurrence is much
less constrained than in their theory. Fox uses his operator specifically to
derive scalar implicature effects, unmooring these effects from their Gricean
foundations and transplanting them into the grammatical system.
Fox’s proposal is
one of several in which scalar implicature is derived as a grammatical effect.
Landman (1998, 2000) and Chierchia (2004, 2006) propose treatments in which
scalar implicature is calculated by the compositional semantic component of the
grammar, while remaining sensitive to general contextual factors in some ways.
The primary motivation for this “grammatical turn” in the treatment of scalars
comes from the phenomenon of embedded implicature, to be discussed briefly in
the next section; but is further motivated by the apparent robustness of these
implicatures. (But see Geurts 2009 and work cited therein for a challenge to
the robustness claim.) What is of particular interest from a foundational
perspective is that this one phenomenon is amenable to analysis in such widely
differing ways, facing us with a paradox observed by Grice in Further Notes:
If we, as speakers, have the requisite knowledge of the
conventional meaning of sentences we employ to implicate, when uttering them,
something the implication of which depends on the conventional meaning in
question, how can we, as theorists, have difficulty with respect to just those
cases in deciding where conventional meaning ends and implicature begins?
4. Embedded Implicature
Cohen (1971) is one of the earliest published critiques of
Grice’s theory of conversational implicature. Cohen raises a number of problems
for Grice, but his paper is best known for this pair of examples:
Sentence (38) implies that the king died first, and the republic was
subsequently declared. Cohen points out (p.58) that this ordering implication
is present also when the conjunction occurs in the antecedent of the
conditional in (39). In fact, this implication seems to be part of the content of the antecedent; for it is
natural to judge the conditional true even if we believe that Tom would be
unhappy if the republic had been declared first, and the king had subsequently
died. But this implication, according to Grice, is supposed to be a
conversational implicature. This thus appears to be a case where a purported conversational
implicature falls under the scope of a semantic operator, a phenomenon now
dubbed embedded implicature. (See
also article 98 Grammatical View of Scalar Implicatures.)
Since Cohen’s work,
many additional types of embedded implicature have been identified. So why
exactly are these examples problematic for Grice? They are problematic for two
reasons, which I call the calculation
problem and the compositionality
problem (see Simons to appear).
The calculation
problem is this: Grice’s account of the calculation of conversational
implicatures does not provide a means for the calculation of implicatures from
non-asserted clauses. Anscrombe & Ducrot (cited by Recanati 2003) provide a
succinct argument to this conclusion:
(a) Conversational implicatures are pragmatic
consequences of an act of saying something.
(b) An act of saying something can be performed
only by means of a complete utterance, not by means of an unasserted clause
such as a disjunct or the antecedent of a conditional.
(c) Hence, no implicature can be generated at the
level of an unasserted clause.
Now, perhaps it is to be expected that exceptions will be
found for the case of Manner implicatures, which involve attention to the form
in which something has been said. But apparent implicatures attaching to
embedded clauses are of all kinds. Consider the examples in (40) and (41) below, both involving scalar implicatures:
↝ Either Kai ate the broccoli or he ate some but not all of the peas.
↝ Bill thinks that Harriet wants to read some but not all of his papers.
In neither case can the observed implicatures be derived via
standard Gricean reasoning from the entire asserted content. (For details, see
the cited papers). Suppose then that we want to allow the implicatures to be
generated in situ. The standard
Gricean machinery simply does not provide a means to do this, as the clauses
which give rise to the implicatures are not themselves said. The calculation
problem, then, is the problem that the Gricean picture provides no means for
calculating implicatures on the basis of content which is not said; but
intuitively, syntactically embedded clauses do sometimes seem to give rise to
implicatures in their own right.
The second problem,
the compositionality problem, can be characterized in two different ways,
depending on whether one is interested solely in the consequences of embedded
implicatures for Grice's views, or for the theory of interpretation more
generally. (For a more general discussion of compositionality, see article 6 Compositionality.)
Starting with the Gricean perspective, the compositionality problem is this:
According to Grice, what is said is supposed to be determined by conventional
content (in addition to reference fixing and disambiguation). But in examples
like (39)-(41), the implicatures apparently generated by embedded clauses
seem to fall under the scope of the embedding operators, and thus to contribute
to the truth conditional content expressed: that is, to what is said.But the
compositionality problem is not merely a problem for Grice’s conception of what
is said. It is more broadly a problem for standard models of the interaction
between conventionally encoded content and inferentially derived content.
Translated into the language of current semantic theory, Grice’s model of what
we now call the semantics/pragmatics interface tells us that processes of
semantic composition are independent of (and are analytically prior to)
processes of pragmatic inferencing. But cases of embedded implicature suggest
that the correct model is one in which, for example, a linguistic operator can
apply to a proposition consisting of both encoded and inferentially derived
content.
It is for this
reason that local pragmatic effects are viewed by non-Gricean pragmaticists as
being of central importance (see Sperber & Wilson 1986, Bach 1994, Recanati
1989, 2004, Levinson 2000) . These effects do not merely require a rethinking
of the mechanism whereby pragmatic effects are derived, but of the entire model
of interpretation. The authors just mentioned all hold that such effects – what
Levinson (2000) calls pragmatic intrusion
– are ubiquitous, going well beyond the types of examples illustrated here. For
such theorists, a central goal of any theory of pragmatic inference should be
to provide an account of local effects, and on this ground the standard Gricean
model is rejected.
5. Alternate models and competing conceptions
In this section, we will discuss the views of theorists who,
while fully embracing the idea that what is conveyed by an utterance includes
both encoded content and inferentially derived content, differ from Grice in
various ways. There are three principal parameters of difference:
(i) the rules or principles involved in inference
(ii) the nature of the input to inference and the
interaction between encoded content and inferential content
(iii) the
appropriate analysis of “what is said” or “literal meaning”
5.1. Explicature
and Implicature in Relevance Theory
Relevance Theory (RT), first formulated in Sperber &
Wilson (1986), is billed as a cognitive theory of communication. Conversational
inference is a central feature of this theory. But Sperber & Wilson differ
from the Gricean conception along all three of the parameters set out above.
On the RT view,
inference is driven by a deep cognitive principle: the impulse to extract
maximal useful information from a stimulus, balanced by the impulse to expend
no more effort than seems justified by the anticipated benefits. (Here, we hear
echoes of the Zipfian principles underlying Horn’s Q- and R- principles.) RT
uses the term Relevance (rather
non-standardly) to characterize this balance between effort and pay-off: the
more cognitive benefits – that is, useful information – a stimulus provides,
the more Relevant it is; but this is offset by the processing effort required
to derive the information. A stimulus has optimal
Relevance just in case the cognitive benefits derived fully justify the
cognitive effort required to derive them.
According to RT,
linguistic communication is governed by the following principle:
Communicative Principle of
Relevance
Every
utterance conveys a presumption of its own optimal relevance.
The goal of interpretation is to identify a speaker meaning
consistent with this presumption. This one over-arching principle is argued to
do all the work which, in Grice’s theory, is done by all the maxims combined.
So, one major
difference between Grice and RT is the conception of what underlies
conversational inference. A second is the specific principle which launches the
process. The third major difference concerns the input to conversational
inference and the interaction between encoded and inferential content.
On the RT
conception, linguistic decoding produces an impoverished semantic object, a
propositional radical or propositionally incomplete logical form. The first
task of Relevance-driven inference is to fill out this skeletal object into a
complete proposition. As noted above, Grice recognized that in order to
identify the proposition expressed, an interpreter must fix the referents of
referential expressions and resolve ambiguities, but said nothing as to the
nature of the processes involved. RT argues, first, that what is required to
construct a complete proposition from what is linguistically encoded goes well
beyond reference fixing and disambiguation. Second, RT argues that there is no
principled distinction to be made between processes involved in “filling out” a
proposition and processes involved in deriving further inferences from the
proposition so retrieved. All are driven by the same presumption of Relevance.
Inferentially
derived content which goes towards “filling out” encoded content into a
complete proposition is called explicature.
Some aspects of content which Griceans treat as generalized conversational
implicatures are analyzed in RT as explicatures, with a corresponding shift in
the semantic analysis of the items in question. The interpretation of scalars
is a central case.
Once all necessary
explicatures have been derived, and the utterance has been associated with a
proposition, Relevance-driven inference may continue. RT preserves the term implicature for these additional
inferences, but makes a further subdivision within this class. In RT, the
interpretation of an utterance is taken to proceed relative to a context, a
context being simply some set of propositions retrievable by the addressee. The
relevance of an utterance is partially determined by the number and utility of
conclusions which can be deductively drawn from the context in conjunction with
the proposition derived from the utterance. Part of the process of
interpretation is the construction of an appropriate context. In RT, the term implicature is used both for
propositions which are infered to be part of the context for interpretation,
and for deductive conclusions drawn on the basis of the constructed context.
The former type of implicature is called an implicated
assumption or implicated premise,
the latter, an implicated conclusion.
This distinction (not coincidentally) maps onto the distinction made above
between background and foreground implicature.
In introducing the
background/foreground distinction, we noted that the extension of the term implicature to background implicatures
involved a departure from the Gricean conception of implicatures as part of
speaker meaning. RT’s implicated conclusions are also not necessarily part of
Gricean speaker meaning. Suppose a speaker produces an utterance U, knowing
that there are multiple contexts relative to which the interpreter might find U
relevant, and knowing that U would give rise to different implicated
conclusions in different contexts. Then there is no particular implicature which the speaker intends to be drawn, and
perhaps not even a determinate set of candidates. For Grice, these inferences
could not count as implicatures; for RT, they do. In fact, RT recognizes a
continuum of implicatures, from those clearly meant by the speaker, to cases
where the speaker expects some
implicated conclusions to be drawn but does not know what they will be. However,
inferences drawn by the interpreter but not driven by the requirements of
Relevance lie beyond the limits of implicature.
5.2. Bach’s
Conversational Impliciture
Kent Bach’s 1994 “Conversational Impliciture” does not present
any revised theory of what underlies implicature derivation. The purpose of the
paper is to demonstrate that “the distinction between what is said and what is
implicated is not exhaustive” (p.124). Between the two lies a level which Bach
calls impliciture.
Like the Relevance
theorists, Bach takes it that the output of semantic decoding is typically
propositionally incomplete. Propositional incompleteness drives a process which
he calls completion: the filling in
of “conceptual gaps” in a “semantically underdeterminate” sentence content.
Completion is semantically or conceptually mandated. An interpreter, merely by
virtue of their knowledge of the language, will be able to identify semantic
incompleteness; and linguistic rules or forms will determine what sorts of
completions are required.
But even after
completion, we may not have arrived at the level of impliciture. In some cases,
a further process called expansion
takes place. This is best explained by illustration. Consider one of Bach’s
central examples: A mother says (unsympathetically) to her child who is
complaining of a cut finger:
(37)
You’re not going to die.
She is not telling her son that he is immortal – the literal
meaning of the sentence – but merely that he will not die from the cut on his
finger. A proper understanding of her utterance requires expanding the
proposition literally expressed to one which is “conceptually more elaborate
than the one that is strictly expressed.” (p.135) This process of expansion is driven by the
interpreter’s recognition that the speaker could not reasonably mean what she
has literally said. So, like ordinary implicature, expansion is driven by the
assumption of the general cooperativity of the speaker.
So, why are these
not simply cases of implicature? Here is how Bach distinguishes the two
notions:
In implicature one says and communicates one thing and thereby
communicates something else in addition. Impliciture, however, is a matter of
saying something but communicating something else instead, something closely
related to what is said (p.126)... Implicitures are, as the name suggests,
implicit in what is said, whereas implicatures are implied by (the saying of)
what is said. (p.140)
Recanati (1989, 2004 and elsewhere) offers a model of
linguistic interpretation, similar in many respects to that of Bach. Like Bach,
Recanati distinguishes conversational implicature from other types of pragmatic
inference which operate locally and which do not utilize “full blown” Gricean
reasoning. Like Bach, Recanati recognizes two distinct sub-types of lower-level
pragmatic processes, which he calls saturation
and modulation: these are roughly
equivalent to Bach’s completion and expansion. Only after these are
completed can anythig akin to Gricean implicature generation begin.
5.3. Levinson:
Generalized Conversational Implicature as Default Interpretation
Like Bach, Levinson is essentially a Gricean, but considers
that Gricean theory requires modification to allow for the fact of “pragmatic
intrusion:” inferential contributions to what is said. These contributions are
what he identifies as Generalized Conversational Implicatures in Levinson 2000.
The specific aspects of interpretation which he identifies as GCIs more or less
overlap with those identified by Relevance theorists, Bach and Recanati as local
pragmatic effects. Unlike them, Levinson proposes that GCIs can be derived on
the basis of (elaborated versions of) the standard Gricean maxims of Quantity,
Relation and Manner. In his formulation, these become the Q-, I-, and M-Maxims,
respectively (“I” for informativity: Cf. Atlas & Levinson 1981).
Two aspects of the
revised maxims are noteworthy. First, for each principle, Levinson gives both a
Speaker’s Maxim and a Recipient’s Corollary. The latter articulates in some
detail what sort of inferences are derivable given the interpretation rule.
This detail is the second noteworthy aspect of the formulation. Unlike Horn’s
proposal, discussed above, which aims for maximum generality, Levinson
incorporates into the speaker corollaries specific inference rules which
produce the central GCI types with which he is concerned. Readers are referred
to the original for the full principles.
As presented so
far, Levinson’s view looks like nothing more than a reformulation of Grice’s.
What distinguishes his position is his view as to how his principles apply. The
central notion for Levinson is that of a default: the principles are claimed to be default “inferential
heuristics” (p.35) which produce default interpretations. Levinson proposes
that the GCI-generating principles apply automatically in the interpretation of
any utterance, unless some contextual factor over-rides their application. The
inference underlying GCIs is supposed to be “based not on direct computations about speaker-intentions but rather on
general expectations about how language is normally used.” (p.22). Application
of default interpretation principles thus lies somewhere in between decoding of
linguistically encoded content and the calculation of true implicatures.
The notion of
default occurs in two ways in Levinson’s view. First, there is the claim that
the interpretative principles apply by default. Second, Levinson describes the
output of these principles as “default interpretations.” Yet as pointed out by
Bezuidenhout & Morris (2004), the interpretations which arise are not
defaults in the sense that their selection requires no choice among
alternatives. Levinson himself, throughout the book, presents multiple options
for GCIs which may be associated with particular words or constructions. And it
is clear, as emphasized by Bezuidenhout (2002), that the choice among these
options often requires reference to wide context – and very likely, reference
to considerations of speaker intention and standard Gricean principles.
As noted, a major
motivation for Levinson’s theory of GCIs is that these implicatures can attach
to subordinate clauses, and contribute to what is said. Levinson claims that
the nature of his rules is such that “the inference can be made without
complete access to the logical form of the whole utterance...Procedurally, the
expression some of the boys G’d can
be immediately associated with the default assumption some but not all of the boys G’d even when some indeterminate
aspect of the predicate G has not yet been resolved” (p.259). Applications of
the I-principle, which for Levinson include enrichment of lexical content,
might similarly be triggered as soon as a particular word is encountered e.g.
the interpretation of “drink” as “alcoholic drink” in I went out for a drink last night. This local triggering of GCIs is
crucial to Levinson’s account of pragmatic intrusion. However, Bezuidenhout
2002 argues rather convincingly against this view of GCIs.
Levinson clearly
holds that standard Gricean implicatures also arise, but gives no indication as
to whether they are generated by the same principles which produce GCIs,
applying in a global, non-default manner; or whether PCIs are assumed to be
generated by the standard (but almost identical) Gricean principles.
56. Formal
and Experimental Approaches
In this article, we have reviewed the foundations of the
analysis of conversational implicature. To conclude, I will briefly introduce
two formal approaches to the study of implicature: Optimality Theoretic
Pragmatics, and Game Theoretic approaches.
The Optimality
Theoretic approach to interpretation is presented as a new take on the Radical
Pragmatics program, adopting the view that linguistic form underdetermines the
propositional content of utterances. In this respect, OT pragmatics shares
underlying assumptions with Relevance Theory, which is cited in some
presentations. It is proposed that OT can provide a framework both for the
processes involved in filling out a full propositional content (e.g. pronoun
resolution, fixing domain restrictions for quantifiers) and in further
elaboration of the content expressed, that is, the generation of implicatures.
OT pragmatics has so far focussed principally on generalized implicatures
involving standard but defeasible interpretations of particular forms: for
example, scalar implicatures,and the association of stereotypical situations
with unmarked syntactic forms (e.g. the interpretation of stop the car vs. cause the
car to stop) – Horn’s “division of pragmatic labor.” So far, highly particularized
implicatures lie outside of the purview of the theory.
OT pragmatics take
much of its inspiration from Horn’s (1984) pragmatic taxonomy (see section 2.4
above), which posits the two conflicting principles, Q and R. Horn’s proposal
is interpreted within OT pragmatics as claiming that pragmatic interpretation
is a matter of achieving an optimal balance in the pairing of forms and
interpretations: a given form f should be assigned an interpretation m which
enriches the linguistic content of f, but not so much that some alternate form
f’ would be a better candidate for the expression of m; while a desired meaning
m should be expressed in a form f which is adequately economical, but not so
much so that some other meaning m’ would be a better candidate to be expressed
by it. This balancing of competing requirements is captured by a modification
of standard OT called Bidirectional OT
(Blutner 2000).
Clearly what this
conception requires is a theory of what renders one candidate
form-interpretation pair better than another. Identifying a set of pragmatic
constraints relative to which to formulate a metric for evaluating the
“goodness” of such pairs is one of the central tasks of OT pragmatics. (For
some contributions to this project, see Blutner & Zeevat (2004). The
introduction to that volume gives a useful overview of the framework.) A second
task of the theory is to fix the definition of optimization, i.e. what counts
as an “adequately good” pairing. See again the aforementioned volume, and also
Blutner (2000). For a book length presentation of the OT approach to
interpretation, integrating syntax, semantics and pragmatics, see Blutner, de
Hoop & Hendriks (2006). See also Article
103 Optimality-theoretic pragmatics.
Decision theory is
a mathematical framework used to model rational decision making, in particular
in situations of incomplete knowledge about the world. The decisions in
question are typically choices among some fixed set of options. Game theory, an
extension of decision theory utilizing the same set of formal tools, is used to
model decisions in situations where two agents interact, and where each agent’s
choices impact on the decision of the other, a so-called game. Decision theory and, more extensively, game theory have been
applied to various aspects of linguistic analysis since Lewis’s pioneering
(1969) work. More recently, some theorists have begun to use game theory to
model pragmatic inference, including the calculation of some types of
implicature. (For a useful introduction to the basic mathematical machinery and
its application to pragmatics, see chapter one of Benz, Jäger & van Rooij
2006; the rest of the book provides a good survey of central topics in the
application of game theory to pragmatics. See also article 105 Game Theory.)
There are two (not
entirely distinct) lines of work in this domain. One line of work attempts to
formalize fundamental pragmatic concepts or principles using game theoretic
tools. Particular attention has been given to the concept of Relevance (see e.g
Marin 1999, van Rooij 2000). A second line of work attempts to replicate the
effects of particular Gricean or neo-Gricean principles using Game Theory. Work
in this line is generally presented as friendly to the Gricean framework,
intended as a precise formulation of it rather than as an alternative.
Like OT, game
theory is set up to model choices among a fixed set of alternative
utterances/interpretations, and hence finds applications in attempts to model
generalized implicatures involving choices among competing expressions. As with
OT, particularized implicatures lie (at least so far) outside of the domain of
the theory. Again, scalar implicature and Horn’s “division of pragmatic labor”
have been targeted for analysis (see van Rooij 2008 and article 105). The
overlap between game theory and OT is not accidental. Dekker & van Rooij (2000)
demonstrate that optimality theoretic models can be given a game theoretic
interpretation, and that optimal interpretations represent Nash equilibria.
These are only samples
of the formal approaches that have been utilized to develop robust accounts of
conversational inference in general and conversational implicature in
particular. A very different line of work, mainly pursued by computer
scientists modelling discourse utilizes Planning Theory (for a starting point,
see Grosz & Sidner 1986).
The developing area of experimental pragmatics offers another kind
of enrichment of traditional Gricean pragmatics, applying the methods of
experimental cognitive psychology to derive data for pragmatic theorizing. Some
work in this area simply tries to apply proper methodology to elicit judgments
from untutored informants, rather than using the standard informal (and, it is
argued, often misleading) methods traditional in pragmatics: see for example
Geurts & Pouscoulous 2009. Other work is aimed at testing the adequacy of
particular pragmatic theories or claims by evaluating their implications for
processing. The approach is to formulate a specific claim about processing
which is implied by the pragmatic theory under investigation, and then to test
that claim empirically. This approach
has been applied recently to the debate about the status of generalized
conversational implicatures, with a variety of experimental techniques being
applied to the question of whether or not these implicatures are “defaults” of
some kind. Techniques range from the use of measures of reading or response
time (e.g. Breheny, Katsos & Williams 2005), eye-tracking over visually presented
examples (e.g. Bezuidenhout & Morris 2004) and even over real world tasks
(e.g. Grodner & Sedivy 2004, Storto & Tanenhaus 2005). Noveck &
Sperber 2004 offers a useful introduction to this area of research.
While an understanding of the conceptual foundations of the
theory of implicature is crucial for meaningful work in this domain, it is only
through the development of formal models that a substantive, predictive theory
of conversational implicature can be provided.
6.
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Keywords
conversational implicature, pragmatics, Grice
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