Thursday, April 15, 2010

Levinson, "Minimisation" essay in Kasher's "Implicature" volume

Minimization and Conversational Inference, by SC Levinson.
Repr. in Kasher, Implicature. Routledge

Levinson's work is another reformulation of Grice's maxims. He uses
Horn's Q-principle (mentioned above), the I-principle
from an earlier work with Atlas (Atlas and Levinson
1981): "Say no more than your hearer needs, given Q", and
a Gricean maxim of relevance, and gives a resolution
mechanism for cases of principle-clash. Levinson argues
that conditions B and C of the Binding Theory (and
possibly other significant portions of the Government and
Binding Theory in syntax) fall out from the interaction
of his neo-Gricean principles.

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