Conversational implicatures in “Negeri 5 Menara”: is the principle of politeness violated?

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 ...

Conversational and conventional implicatures

Conversational Implicatures in Indirect Replies

I In this paper we present algorithms for the interpretation and generation of a kind of particu-larized conversational implicature occurring in certain indirect replies. Our algorithms make use of discourse expectations, discourse plans, and discourse relations. The algorithms calculate implica-tures of discourse units of one or more sentences. Our approach has several advantages. First, by ta...

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...

The Computational Complexity of Avoiding Conversational Implicatures

Referring expressions and other object descriptions should be maximal under the Local Brevity, No Unnecessary Components, and Lexical Preference preference rules; otherwise, they may lead hearers to infer unwanted conversational implicatures. These preference rules can be incorporated into a polynomial time generation algorithm, while some alternative formalizations of conversational impficatur...