I use game theory, decision theory, and situation theory to model a class of implicatures. Two types of relevance are distinguished and used to construct a model of Gricean communication between speaker and addressee. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n Grice's[5] account of nonnatural communication includes as a corollary an account of how more can be communicated than what is saidJ ,Conversely 2, the G...

This paper examines the roles which presupposition and implicature play with respect to what is asserted by a text and to its context, as a part of the process of text understanding. This process involves constructing and updating the representation of the context. Assertion, implicature and presupposition can be described as three different ways in which changes in the representation of the co...

This article presents evidence that individual words and phrases can contribute multiple independent pieces of meaning simultaneously. Such multidimensionality is a unifying theme of the literature on conventional implicatures and expressives. I use phenomena from discourse, semantic composition, and morphosyntax to detect and explore various dimensions of meaning. I also argue that, while the ...

We explain the relevance of Nash, Hoare and others in explaining Gricean implicature and cheap talk. We also develop a general model to address cases where communication is not cooperative, i..e cases of deception as well as cases where there is common knowledge of different interests in speaker and hearer. Tow models, one qualitative and one quantitative are introduced.

Sentences with disjunction in the scope of a possibility modal often convey something stronger than predicted under the standard semantics for modals and disjunction, roughly paraphrasable in terms of a wide scope conjunction. You may have beer or wine, for example, is naturally understood as conveying that you may have beer and that you may have wine. This ‘puzzle of free choice permission’ (R...

In his paper ‘Logic and conversation’ Grice (1989: 37) introduced a distinction between generalized and particularized conversational implicatures. His notion of a generalized conversational implicature (GCI) has been developed in two competing directions, by neo-Griceans such as Horn (1989) and Levinson (1983, 1987b, 1995, 2000) on the one hand, and relevance theorists such as Sperber & Wilson...