The Dynamics of Sense and Implicature

This thesis is a both a descriptive and theoretical examination of implicatures, parts of the contextual meanings of utterances that are separate from their sense, their main point. The empirical taxonomy I describe draws on the work of Grice (1975), but fleshes out two important subcategories of implicature that he did not discuss in detail. One of these subcategories is the conventional implicatures, which contains definite anaphora, iterative adverbs, honorifics, and Potts’s (2005) “CIs”: nominal appositives, nonrestrictive relative clauses, as-parentheticals, and expressives. The other is the nonconventional implicatures apart from Grice’s conversational implicatures, which contains lexical items often construed as bearing presuppositions, such as so-called factive verbs, aspectuals, and achievements. I offer evidence that what distinguishes the class of anaphora from other conventional implicatures is that the use of a definite must be anchored to the speaker, since it bears the implication that an antecedent is retrievable in the discourse context. This new characterization of the landscape of implicatures holds significant consequences for semantic theory. The notion of contextual felicity usually assumed to apply to presuppositions is generalized to a mechanism that accounts for the (in)felicity of all conventional implicatures on the basis of whether their content conflicts with entailments present in the discourse context. For the nonanaphoric implicatures, the choice between anchoring their implicature to the speaker or to an embedded perspective is influenced in part by this new notion of contextual felicity. Since it places nonanaphoric lexical items usually thought to be presuppositional under the category of nonconventional implicatures, the terms presupposition and anaphora become synonymous. As a corollary, the process of presupposition accommodation (Lewis, 1979) takes on a more limited role than is usually thought.