Disimplicature

Speranza

Grice develops a framework for compositional semantics, and begins illustrating its fruitfulness by applying it to certain core linguistic data. The key move is to introduce object-language variables for assignment functions into the syntax; semantic values are treated systematically in terms of sets of assignments, now included in the model. The framework provides an alternative to traditional “context-index”-style frameworks descending from Kamp/Kaplan/Lewis/Stalnaker. 

A principal feature of the account is that it systematizes a range of seemingly disparate linguistic “shifting” phenomena, such as with quantifiers, intensionality, and context-sensitivity under modals and attitude verbs. The treatment of the syntax/semantics provides an elegant standardization of quantification across domains (individuals, worlds, assignments), via a generalized (type-flexible, cross-categorial) binder-index resulting from type-driven movement. The account affords a unified analysis of the context-sensitivity of expressions such as pronouns, epistemic modals, etc., in the spirit of contextualist theories, while compositionally deriving certain distinctive shifting/binding phenomena and providing a framework for theorizing about differences in tendencies for local/global readings. Extensions to questions, conditionals, and relative clauses are explored. I show how independently motivated syntactic analyses can be implemented in an assignment-variable-based compositional semantics: Interrogative sentences denote a partition of possible answers, with answers conceived as sets of assignments (possibilities). ‘If ’-clauses are treated as free relatives/correlatives, interpreted as plural definite descriptions of assignments. Headed restrictive relative clauses are treated as complements of the matrix determiner, which introduces quantification over assignments. A unified analysis of wh-words, relative determiners, and indefinites as choice-function pronouns is provided. Various additional linguistic shifting phenomena are compositionally derived, e.g. concerning “interrogative flip,” indexical shift, information-sensitivity, and donkey anaphora. 

The accounts avoid introducing additional interpretive principles and composition rules such as for quantification, binding, movement (e.g. Predicate Abstraction, Predicate Modification, Trace Conversion). 

The semantics is fully compositional; all semantic composition proceeds via function