Abstract
I will examine negations that are “irregular” in that they are not used in accordance with standard logical rules. These include scalar-, metalinguistic-, specifying-, and evaluative-implicature denials; presupposition-canceling denials; and contrary affirmations. The principal questions are how their irregular interpretations are related to their regular interpretation, and whether their ambiguity is semantic or pragmatic. I argue here that pragmatic “explicature” (Carston) or “impliciture” (Bach) theories have few advantages over implicature theories (Grice, Horn, Burton-Roberts), and that clear examples of pragmatic explicatures involve indexicality or syntactic ellipsis, which are not involved in irregular negations. I argue against claims that any interpretation can be “pragmatically derived” using either Gricean or Relevance theory. With one class of exceptions, I argue for a semantic ambiguity thesis maintaining that irregular interpretations are idioms that plausibly evolved from generalized conversational implicatures. The exceptions are evaluative-implicature denials, which are still live implicatures.
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Notes
- 1.
See Horn (1989: 385); Geurts (1998); Davis (2010, 2011). The formulation of the negation in (c) is colloquial. In formal writing, we would enclose ‘Vulcan is hot’ in quotation marks. There are no quotation marks in speech, but the subordinated sentence would receive a distinctive intonation contour. The most explicit formulation is ‘The proposition that Vulcan is hot is not true’.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
See also Gazdar (1979: 67); Horn (1985: 135); (1990: 495, 500); (1992a: 265); (2004: 10); Carston (1988: 320); (1996: 312, 320–322, 325n7, 327); (1998: 317–8); Burton-Roberts (1989: 111, 118ff); Van der Sandt (1991: 334–5, 337); (2003: §3, §4); Chapman (1996: 389, 392); Levinson (2000: 212); Huang (2007: 44). Horn (1989: 363, 374–7, 420–434) discusses many others who have held similar views, and credits the term ‘metalinguistic’ to Ducrot (1972). Contrast Geurts (1998: 278, 294).
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
See Grice (1975: 31); Levinson (1983: 134–5); Horn (1992b: 260–2). Griceans sometimes weaken the premise to “It is unlikely that the speaker was observing the Cooperative Principle unless he believed (or implicated) I”; see Bach and Harnish (1979: 92–3); Levinson (1983: 115–6); Leech (1983: 30–44), 153. The same problems arise whether alternative implicatures are supposed to be impossible or improbable.
- 9.
See also Huang (2006).
- 10.
See also Wilson and Sperber (1981: 168–71), (2004: 612); Sperber and Wilson (1986: 381–2), (1987: 702–04), (1995: 258, 270); Kempson (1986: 89ff); Carston (1987), (1988: 42–4); Blakemore (1987: 54–71); (1992: 24–37); Yus (2006: 513–4). For critiques by a number of prominent authors, see Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 10, 1987, 697–754, especially the articles by Bach and Harnish, Clark, Hinkelman, Levinson, Macnamara, Russell, and Seuren. See also Walker (1989), Levinson (1989), Davis (1998: Sect. 3.12), Bach (2010: 136).
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
In some places, Sperber and Wilson (1986: 95–6, 1987: 702) try to prevent an infinite set of contextual implications by restricting the rules of inference to “elimination” rules. It is not clear that this effort succeeds (see e.g., Davis 1998: 102). But if it does, it calls into question the importance of “Relevance” so defined. Why would people care about this oddly defined measure?
- 15.
This is one of the paradoxes of infinity. To see the point, note that there are as many integers greater than five as there are greater than four, which is shown by the fact that the two sets can be put in a one-to-one correspondence.
- 16.
See also Sperber and Wilson (1986: 158, 1987: 704, 1995: 270); Carston (1987: 714, 1998: 336, 2010: 247); Wilson and Sperber (2004: 611). Wilson and Sperber (2004: 614) claim that “there should be no more than one” interpretation with a satisfactory degree of Relevance because “an utterance with two apparently satisfactory competing interpretations would cause the hearer the unnecessary extra effort of choosing between them.” But such extra effort is not unnecessary if, as is usually the case, it is impossible for the speaker to prevent the existence of such competing interpretations.
- 17.
See also Sperber and Wilson (1986: 168–9, 1987: 705); Carston (1998: 341, 2010: 218); Wilson and Sperber (2004: 613, 626); Yus (2006: 514). Sometimes they say “order of accessibility” rather than “path of least resistance.” Bach’s (2010: 130) gloss is significantly different: “consider hypotheses about what the speaker means in the order in which they occur to you—how else?—and… stop as soon as a sufficiently plausible one comes to mind.” ‘Relevant’ does not mean “plausible.” Note that we often reject what we initially take to be plausible for an interpretation that is more plausible.
- 18.
Relevance theorists sometimes assume that inferring an implicature takes less effort than “decoding” what the speaker said (e.g., Carston 1998: 337–8). Sometimes they assume the opposite (e.g., Wilson and Sperber 1986: 383). There is no basis for either assumption given our inability to measure processing effort.
- 19.
- 20.
- 21.
Carston seems to be assuming a Russellian interpretation of definite descriptions, although she makes no such claim. She does imply that the wide-scope presupposition-canceling interpretation involves “Predicate denial (or sentence negation)” rather than “term (constituent) negation” (cf. Horn 1989: 107). But it is hard to see how one can deny the predicate ‘is bald’ of the king of France without presupposing that France has a king. Horn generally does not distinguish the presupposition-canceling interpretation from the metalinguistic. See for example Horn (1989: 374–5, 1992a: 265); but contrast Horn (1989: 488–9, 1990: 496, 500).
- 22.
This is clearly true in standard logic, in which a contradiction entails every proposition all by itself; hence nothing is entail by the conjunction of a contradiction and the set of contextual assumptions that is not entailed by either alone. The claim may not be true in a relevance logic.
- 23.
Carston’s claim that the process of reinterpretation might return to the descriptive wide-scope interpretation also appears to contradict her claim in the next paragraph that “The semantic level differs from the two pragmatic levels in that no final interpretation will ever involve it alone…” (1998: 341) This complements the contradiction in her claim that marked negations are “essentially” but not “absolutely” metalinguistic (echoic, metarepresentational) (1996: 319, 320; 1998: 335ff, 1999: 380).
- 24.
- 25.
- 26.
See also Wilson and Sperber (1981: 159, 2004: 615, fn. 18); Sperber and Wilson (1995: 256–8); Carston (1999: 373, 2002: 124, 2004a: 633, 635, 648, 2010: 265, 266, 269). Carston appears to officially reject (19) (see 2010: 258, 234, 269–70) as well as (2004a: 634); see also Wilson and Sperber (1981: 159) and Sperber and Wilson (1995: 257–8).
- 27.
There is one difference in Carston’s (2002: 116, 124) definition, but it will not matter here.
- 28.
Carston (2002: 118) offered a reply to Levinson’s (1987: 723) presentation of this objection: “This implicature is not derived by a process of pragmatically developing the decoded content of B’s utterance; plainly, it is derived purely inferentially, by a straightforward deductive inference, one of whose premises is the assumption which is derived by development of the encoded content…” First, it is not clear what “development” means when it denotes a process rather than a structural relationship, nor whose performance of that process would be relevant to whether something B expressed counts as an implicature. Second, Carston seems here to be contradicting the Relevance theorist’s claim, separating them from Griceans, that explicatures and implicatures are both derived by pragmatic inferences guided by the Principle of Relevance (see e.g., Carston 1988: 37; 2004a: 633, 636, 643; 2010: 242–3, 246–7, 270; Wilson and Sperber 2004: 615).
- 29.
I identify and define different types of speaker meaning in terms of expression in Davis (2003).
- 30.
Grice was idiosyncratic in taking ‘S says that p’ to entail ‘S means that p.’ So he was forced in the case of metaphorical usage to say that the speaker “makes as if to say,” and would deny that the speaker even makes as if to say in the case of verbal slips. Cf. Neale (1992: 523–4, 549); Bach (2001: 17, 2010: 134); Davis (2007); Carston (2010: 220).
- 31.
Neither ‘what is said’ nor ‘what is directly meant’ fits Carston’s use of explicature given that she allows “higher order” explicatures. See e.g., Carston (2010: 223).
- 32.
Another reason Carston (1988: 38) gives for her “functional independence” rule is that if the implicature entails the explicature, the latter need not be stored in memory too, “since all the information given by the latter is also given by the former.” This falsely assumes that a person is aware of all the information entailed by a proposition as soon as that proposition is recalled, and that adding to total knowledge is the only goal of our mental life.
- 33.
For a more recent example of this act-object confusion, see (Carston 2010: 225).
- 34.
- 35.
It may be that Grice took all explicature to be semantic. But I believe he was simply ignoring indexicality for simplicity, as was common at the time. An additional complication is that ‘S said that… NP…’ has both transparent and opaque interpretations, the former being weaker than the latter. If John says “I saw Obama,” then “John said that he saw the president” is true when transparent but false when opaque.
- 36.
Bach (2001: 19) sometimes says implicatures must be “external” to what is said. This would seem true as long as the implicature is not a part of what is said.
- 37.
Bach (2010: 132) later said “In implicating something, a speaker means one thing and conveys something else in addition… To ‘implicite’ something (if I may coin a term) is to say it, but only partially, since one is leaving part of what one means implicit.” Bach’s definition of ‘implicature’ here conforms to mine. But if part of what one means is not said, then there is something one meant but did not say—hence something one implicated.
- 38.
(35) can be used to express a complete thought in special contexts, by saying “A completed…” and then pointing to what it is A completed. The demonstrative element completes the thought.
- 39.
She cites Martí (2006).
- 40.
Bach (2001: 17) nonetheless claims that not all elements of an uttered sentence need be uttered. But if a speaker fails to utter any word or morpheme in (36), she does not utter (36). Someone who utters ‘I know a richer man than Ross’ does not utter (36), even though he might say the same thing.
- 41.
Since (36) is syntactically ambiguous, (a) and (b) are semantic rather than pragmatic explicatures.
- 42.
Bach (1994: 132) would deny that this is ellipsis because the omitted element is not syntactically determined.
- 43.
- 44.
- 45.
- 46.
Atlas might be claiming that M is a propositional form of which I and R are specific instances—like ‘A finished NP,’ whose substitution instances include ‘A finished the sonata’ and ‘A finished dinner.’ But there is no one form of the regular interpretation and all the irregular interpretations of a negation such that all the interpretations are just different substitution instances. Besides, on no interpretation do any of the negations in (1) seem to represent a form.
- 47.
- 48.
- 49.
Both Bach and Carston depart from Grice in not classifying what is meant in figurative speech as implicature. This is partly a terminological difference (Sect. 8). But they also make a substantive mistake in denying that figurative uses involve indirection (Bach 1987: 71; 1994: 144; 2001: 41, n. 3; 2006: 27–8; Carston 2010: 220). When a speaker uses ‘It is a beautiful day’ ironically, for example, the speaker means and expresses the belief that it is not a beautiful day by saying that it is a beautiful day (though not by meaning that it is a beautiful day). Moreover, it is essential to this being irony, rather than speaking in a code, that the speaker means that it is not a beautiful day by using a sentence by which he means “It is a beautiful day.” I sort out these complexities in Davis (2003: Ch. 2).
- 50.
‘Literal’ is also used to describe the etymology of a word, as when it is said that ‘hippopotamus’ literally means “river horse.” In this case, the literal meaning is not something the word means in English at all.
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Davis, W.A. (2013). Irregular Negations: Pragmatic Explicature Theories. In: Capone, A., Lo Piparo, F., Carapezza, M. (eds) Perspectives on Pragmatics and Philosophy. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01011-3_14
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