Abstract
The existence of “local implicatures” has been the topic of much recent debate. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this debate by asking what we can learn from three puzzles, namely, the cancellation of such implicatures by or both, their behavior in the complement clauses of negative factive verbs such as sorry, and their behavior in root and embedded questions. Two basic approaches to local implicatures have been advanced: a fully pragmatic account in which local implicatures result from conventional Gricean principles and a semantic account according to which the generation of implicatures is interwoven with compositional, grammatical mechanisms. We argue that the lesson to be learned from our three case studies is that some kind of approach along the latter, grammatical line is necessary to account for the data.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bartsch Renate. (1973) “Negative transportation” gibt es nicht. Linguistische Berichte 27: 1–7
Chemla, Emmanuel, and Benjamin Spector. 2009. Experimental evidence for embedded scalar implicatures. Manuscript, IJN and LSCP.
Chierchia, Gennaro. 2004. Scalar implicatures, polarity phenomena, and the syntax/pragmatics interface. In Structures and beyond, ed. A. Belletti, 39–103. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chierchia Gennaro. (2006) Broaden your views: Implicatures of domain widening and the “locality” of language. Linguistic Inquiry 37: 535–590
Chierchia, Gennaro. 2007. NPIs in questions: Why strength matters. Handout of a talk given at NELS 38, Ottawa.
Chierchia, Gennaro, Danny Fox, and Benjamin Spector. 2009. The grammatical voice of scalar implicatures and the relationship between semantics and pragmatics. In Handbook of semantics, ed. Paul Portner et al. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter (to appear).
Fox, Danny. 2003. Implicature calculation, only and lumping: another look at the puzzle of disjunction. Handout of talk given at Yale University.
Gajewski, Jon. 2005. Neg-raising: Polarity and presupposition. PhD dissertation, MIT.
Gajewski Jon. (2008) Neg-raising and polarity. Linguistics and Philosophy 30: 289–328
Gajewski, Jon. Comments on Chierchia. In Mirror Lake Papers University of Connecticut Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 15, eds. Nilüfer Şener, Carlos Buesa García and Tsuyoshi Sawada, pp. 99–110. MITWPL: Cambridge, MA.
Gazdar Gerald. (1979) Pragmatics: Implicature, presupposition, and logical form. Academic Press, New York
Geurts Bart. (2009) Scalar implicatures and local pragmatics. Mind and Language 24: 51–79
Geurts Bart, Nausicaa Pouscoulous. (2009) Embedded implicatures?!?. Semantics and Pragmatics 2(4): 1–34
Grice, H. P. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Syntax and semantics vol. 3: Speech acts, ed. P. Cole and J. Morgan, 41–58. New York: Academic Press.
Guerzoni Elena, Yael Sharvit. (2007) A question of strength: On NPIs in interrogative clauses. Linguistics and Philosophy 30: 361–391
Heim, I. 1991. Articles and definiteness, published in German as ‘Artikel und Definitheit’. In Semantics: An international handbook of contemporary research, ed. A. V. Stechow and D. Wunderlich, 487–534. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Heim, Irene. 1994. Interrogative complements of know. In Proceedings of the 9th annual IATL conference, ed. R. Buchalla and A. Mittwoch, 128–144. Jerusalem: Hebrew University.
Heim, Irene. 2000. Degree operators and scope. In Proceedings of semantics and linguistic theory, vol. 10, ed. B. Jackson and T. Matthews, 40–64. Ithaca: CLC Publications.
Heim Irene, Angelika Kratzer. (1998) Semantics in generative grammar. Blackwell, Malden
Horn Laurence. (1989) A natural history of negation. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Hurford James R. (1974) Exclusive or inclusive disjunction. Foundations of Language 11: 409–411
Landman, Fred. 1998. Plurals and maximalization. In Events and grammar, ed. S. Rothstein, 237–271. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Levinson Stephen C. (2000) Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. MIT Press, Cambridge
Russell Benjamin. (2006) Against grammatical computation of scalar implicatures. Journal of Semantics 23: 361–382
Sauerland Uli. (2004a) Scalar implicatures in complex sentences. Linguistics and Philosophy 27: 367–391
Sauerland Uli. (2004b) Embedded implicatures. Journal of Cognitive Science 5: 107–137
Sharvit, Yael, and Jon Gajewski. 2008. On the calculation of local implicatures. In Proceedings of the 26th West Coast conference on formal linguistics, ed. C. Chang and H. Haynie, 411–419. Somerville: Cascadilla Press.
Simons, Mandy. 2006. Notes on embedded implicatures. Manuscript, Carnegie Mellon University.
von Fintel Kai. (1999) NPI licensing, Strawson-entailment, and context dependency. Journal of Semantics 16: 97–148
van Rooij Robert, Katrin Schulz. (2004) Exhaustive interpretation of complex sentences. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 13: 491–519
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Gajewski, J., Sharvit, Y. In defense of the grammatical approach to local implicatures. Nat Lang Semantics 20, 31–57 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-011-9074-x
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-011-9074-x