Conversational Implicatures Via General Pragmatic Pressures

This paper aims to show how general pragmatic pressures, interacting with the context of utterance, can produce specific conversational implicatures — as well as the lack thereof in nonsupporting environments. Inspired by the work of Merin (1997), Blutner (1998), van Rooy (2003a), Benz et al. (2005), and others, I use probabilities to represent speakers’ belief states and the content of their utterances. These values determine an utterance’s quality rating and quantity rating. I adapt Roberts’ (1996) view of the question under discussion to define a relevance ranking of utterances. These values come together in a definition of felicitous utterance. This definition licenses certain inferences — relevance implicatures relating to the question under discussion (section 4.1) and a variety of quantity implicatures (sections 4.2–4.3).