Varieties of Conventional Implicature: Evidence from Japanese

This paper examines the linguistic realization of conventional implicatures, taking the semantics and pragmatics of the Japanese adverbials sekkaku and yokumo as a test case. It is shown that their meanings involve an interesting and hitherto unstudied mix of asserted and conventionally implicated content. An extension of Potts’s (2005) LCI logic for supplementary conventional implicatures is proposed which is capable of analyzing objects of mixed conventional implicature and at-issue type, and objects with conventionally implicated meanings which provide the main content of their utterances. The logic is then applied to a range of other constructions and lexical items in several languages, and used to repair an infelicity in the original system.