Conventional Implicatures in Argumentation

Conversational and conventional implicatures

Conventional implicatures , a distinguished class of meanings ∗

The history of conventional implicatures is rocky, their current status uncertain. It seems wise to return to their source and start fresh, with an open-minded reading of the original definition (Grice, 1975) and an eye open for novel support. Suppose the textbook examples (therefore, even, but and synonyms) disappeared. Where would conventional implicatures be then? This paper argues that they...

How and Why Conventional Implicatures Project

It is well-known that a single utterance may convey different types of information, for example new and old information. It is not always clear, however, how these types of content relate to each other. One way to pursue a unified semantic analysis would be to see how different types of content that exhibit the same semantic property relate to each other. Of particular interest in this context ...

Christopher Potts, The logic of conventional implicatures (Oxford

Paul Grice warned that 'the nature of conventional implicature needs to be examined before any free use of it, for explanatory purposes, can be indulged in' (1978/1989: 46). Christopher Potts heeds this warning, brilliantly and boldly. Starting with a definition drawn from Grice's few brief remarks on the subject, he distinguishes conventional implicature from other phenomena with which it migh...

Continuation-based semantics for conventional implicatures and the Japanese benefactive

Potts' (2005) innovative theory of conventional implicatures (CIs) has provided us with a formal tool for investigating an empirical domain hitherto largely unexplored. The central property of his CI logic is its multidimensionality, which is intended to capture the independence of CI meanings from ordinary truth conditions (which Potts calls the 'at-issue' meaning): most importantly , the comb...