Argumentative Properties of Pragmatic Inferences
نویسنده
چکیده
In this paper we propose an argumentative account for a discourse constraint on the reinforcement of some implicatures. We argue that this constraint is not due to the nature of inferences at hand but rather on distinct argumentative relations between the propositions they express. We examine the effect of these relations on the possible discourse relations a speaker is entitled to use in his discourse and the links between argumentative properties and logical relations such as entailment. This paper seeks to provide an explanation for the often overlooked discourse constraints that intervene when cancelling or re-asserting the content of some implicatures. Conversational implicatures as described by Grice (1989) are parts of the meaning of a sentence that aren’t part of what a speaker said in Grice’s favoured sense. As such, they can supposedly both be freely reasserted or explicitely cancelled since they were never actually uttered and thus never “officially” endorsed by the speaker. As we’ll show in this paper it turns out that the discourse segments reasserting or cancelling implicatures can be connected to the utterance tht gives rise to the implicature only by some discourse connectives. In the first section we do a survey of the kind of such discursive constraints and evaluate an explanation that would solely rely on inference mechanisms. We show how this approach is flawed and in therest of this work we aim at giving an explanation of these facts in an argumentative perspective based on the works of Anscombre and Ducrot and later proposals by Merin. In the second section we summarize the argumentative approach to pragmatics. We claim that some implicatures are in a systematic rhetorical opposition to the utterance they are derived from, a fact which licenses the use of a contrast for reinforcement. We also underscore how an exhaustivity account (as expounded by van Rooij (2004)), that also includes argumentativity, allows the same kind of predictions. In the third section we go on to predict and validate some of the consequences of this approach, most notably with its influence on items related by logical relations such as entailment. Besides licensing it, this opposition seemingly requires the presence of contrast. We propose two different views to explain this preference ⋆ I thank Pascal Amsili, Jacques Jayez, Frédéric Laurens, François Mouret and the audiences at JSM’08 and FSIM’4 for their precious help and comments about previous versions of parts of this work.
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