Conversational Impliciture

Presupposition and Implicature

“…This leads Karttunen & Peters (1979) to define a projection theory for conventional implicatures that largely mirrors earlier projection theories for presuppositions. The results seem to compromise the independence of conventional implicatures, since they can end up being merged with the at-issue content during semantic composition (Bach, 1999). However, it opens up new avenues in the study of projection behavior, since it decouples projection from backgrounding (accommodation) and helps introduce new empirical phenomena into the debate (Simons et al, 2010;Tonhauser et al, 2013).…”

“…of the conventional implicature might be highly context-dependent, as I remarked above, but this is arguably a routine example of lexical vagueness, which is pervasive in the at-issue dimension as well (Partee 1995: 332). This makes the label 'implicature' seem somewhat inapt (which Bach (1999) uses as a conceptual argument against conventional implicature).…”

“…Such views argue that some things traditionally classified as conversational implicatures (mostly, scalar implicatures) are in fact derived via a process of taking an underspecified logical form and fleshing it out. Bach (1994Bach ( , 2006c) calls these 'conversational implicitures'. Relevance Theorists take a similar view, classifying them as 'explicatures' (based on the idea that they involve making an underspecified logical form more explicit).…”

“…Bach (1999) and Neale (1999) credit Frege (1892Frege ( /1980 with first identifying this class of meanings. Frege diagnosed the concessive adverb "although" as contributing, not to the 'sense' (roughly, the at-issue content) but rather to "illuminating it in a particular fashion" (p. 155; see also Frege 1918Frege /1994 on the connotations of nouns like "cur ").…”

Pragmatics, modularity and mindreading

“…Grice himself seems to have seen explicit communication as largely a matter of linguistic and contextual decoding, and only implicit communication as properly inferential (Grice 1989: 25), and many pragmatists have followed him on this (Searle, 1969;Bach and Harnish, 1979;Levinson, 1983;Bach, 1994; for discussion, see the papers by Breheny; Carston; Recanati; and Stanley, this volume). However, the code-like pragmatic rules that have been proposed so far do not work particularly well.…”