Everything you always wanted to know about McCawley (but were afraid to ask)

JD McCawley, in "Conversational Implicature and the Lexicon, repr. in Kasher, "Implicature" (Routledge), argues that differences in use between some lexical items and complex expressions matching their suggested semantic
decomposition (i.e.; kill vs. cause to die) are due to
Grice's maxim of Quantity and hence don't provide
evidence against decomposition.