Are Conversational Implicatures Cancellable? A Critical Review of Grice’s Cancellability Test

Conversational Implicatures

According to standard pragmatics, we should account for conversational implicatures in terms of Grice's (1975) maxims of conversation. Neo-Griceans like Atlas & Levinson (1981) and Horn (1984) seek to reduce those maxims to the so-called Q and I-principles. In this paper I want to argue that (i) there are major problems for reducing Gricean pragmatics to these two principles, and (ii) that, in ...

On explicatures, cancellability and cancellation

Within the Gricean framework only what is conversationally implicated is cancellable, whereas what is conventionally implicated and what is said cannot be cancelled without giving rise to contradiction. In the relevance-theoretic framework, however, the question is whether explicatures, which replace the Gricean notion of what is said, are cancellable. In recent years, various objections to the...

Conversational and conventional implicatures

Implicature, Inference and Cancellability

The standard position in pragmatics to date has been that cancellability is useful way of differentiating implicatures from logical implications, semantic entailments and the like. In recent years, however, there has been considerable debate as to whether implicatures are in fact always cancellable, or indeed whether they are cancellable at all, amongst linguistic pragmaticians and language phi...

rEfErEntial DEscriptions anD conVErsational iMplicaturEs

The standard Gricean defense of russell in the face of referential uses of descriptions has been to claim that these uses are conversational implicatures. My argument in “The case for referential Descriptions” focused on showing that these uses are not particularized implicatures. I now adapt and develop this argument to show that they are not generalized implicatures nor otherwise pragmatic. I...