It’s the same the whole world over!

Speranza

suggest that Grice will have to concede that at least some occurrences of ‘and’ have a genuinely temporal (or causal) component.

Carston (1988) has come up with a story about ‘and’ that neither succumbs to the tentacles of the ambiguity theorist nor generates the compositional problem the official Gricean story faces. The meaning of ‘and’ is given by logical conjunction, but a hearer seeking a relevant interpretation will often construe the contents of the conjuncts as (e.g.) temporally sequenced or causally related. And if, for example, a temporally sequenced understanding of a sub-utterance of ‘φ and ψ’ is retrieved, it will be this (stronger) conjunction that forms the content of the antecedent of the full utterance ‘if φ and ψ then χ’.

Karttunen and Peters (1979) and Levinson (1983) point out that many more expressions than those discussed by Grice appear to generate conventional implicatures, e.g. ‘even’, ‘still’, ‘yet’, ‘anyway’, ‘however’, ‘nevertheless’, ‘in fact’, and ‘besides’. (Levinson also argues that the ‘tu’/‘vous’ distinction in French and a range of honorifics in, for example, Japanese, Korean, and Tamil are associated with conventional implicatures.) Frege, as we saw earlier, took (10) and (11) to have the same sense:

(10) Alfred has not arrived yet

(11) Alfred has not arrived.

On Grice’s account, what someone says by uttering these sentences is the same (that Alfred has not arrived), but by uttering (11) he is also indicating or suggesting that someone (perhaps the speaker) expects Alfred to arrive (again, this is too narrow). In the framework I am trying to motivate, the content of the suggestion is a second proposition expressed, parasitic upon the ground-floor proposition (that Alfred has not arrived). The difference is, perhaps, not very interesting in many cases (including this one), but it may make for the construction of a more systematic compositional semantics overall.

Compare the following:

(12) Alfred cashed a check today

(13) Alfred managed to cash a check today

(14) Alfred succeeded in cashing a check today.

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Someone who utters any of these says the same thing on Grice’s view. But by uttering (13) or (14) the speaker performs a higher-order speech act of indicating that Alfred’s cashing of a check today was something of a challenge, or less of a challenge than someone might have thought, or that there was some risk of failure (again, the precise content of this conventionally signalled implication may be determined contextually). On the view I am exploring, the speaker has again expressed two propositions, one parasitic on the other, something a compositional semantics needs to explain.

The phenomena noted by Frege, Grice, and others are, I think, quite natural once we take into account the nature of communication. We do not seek to transmit information only about the world; communication may also involve the transmission of information about our attitudes and emotions; thus we convey information using expressions such as ‘It is raining’ and also sentences such as ‘Damn, it’s raining’, ‘I think it’s raining’, and ‘Damn, I think it’s raining’. That is, in many cases we use simple sentences to express a single proposition and we use modifications of those sentences to express the original proposition (or its “negation”, as in ‘Alfred failed to cash a check today’ and ‘Alfred tried unsuccessfully to cash a check today’) together with a second (third, . . .) proposition. I turn now to the idea that sequences of propositions expressed are not restricted to Fregean-Gricean examples of colouring, which may constitute only the tip of a semantic iceberg.12

12 Frege, as we saw earlier, retains the Principle of Composition in respect of reference in the face of apparent problems introduced by sentential verbs and other devices of subordination by treating a sentence occurring within the scope of such a device as either referring to its customary sense or else contributing to a second proposition (thereby abandoning Semantic Innocence). Since he was not particularly interested in coloring, he says nothing about compositionality in connection with this notion. Similarly, Grice does not examine conventional implicature in connection with embedded sentences; but Karttunen and Peters (1979) have examined the matter in detail and have come up with some generalizations about embedding constructions. For example, they claim that in structures of the form ‘A φs that p’, we need to distinguish three different classes of sentential verb φ according as the structure (i) inherits (‘know’, ‘regret’, ‘discover’, ‘forget’, ‘point out’), (ii) transforms (‘believe’, ‘think’, ‘hope’, ‘expect’, ‘doubt’, ‘fear’, ), or (iii) blocks (‘say’, ‘report’, ‘claim’) the conventional implicatures generated by p. These claims are surely incorrect as far as the original Fregean and Gricean examples are concerned. Consider the following:

(i) a. Bill knows that Alfred has not arrived yet b. Bill thinks that Alfred has not arrived yet c. Bill said that Alfred has not arrived yet

(ii) a. Bill knows that she is poor but she is honest 26