Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Gricean pragmatics
- 2 The Standard Recipe for Q-implicatures
- 3 Scalar implicatures
- 4 Psychological plausibility
- 5 Nonce inferences or defaults?
- 6 Intentions, alternatives, and free choice
- 7 Embedded implicatures: the problems
- 8 Embedded implicatures: a Gricean approach
- Afterword
- Notation and abbreviations
- References
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Gricean pragmatics
- 2 The Standard Recipe for Q-implicatures
- 3 Scalar implicatures
- 4 Psychological plausibility
- 5 Nonce inferences or defaults?
- 6 Intentions, alternatives, and free choice
- 7 Embedded implicatures: the problems
- 8 Embedded implicatures: a Gricean approach
- Afterword
- Notation and abbreviations
- References
- Index
Summary
This book is all about one simple idea: that speakers convey information not only by what they say, but also by what they don't say. In fact, the idea is so obvious that we may never know who had it first. What is known is that around the mid-19th century, John Stuart Mill thought it obvious enough to be mentioned almost in passing:
If I say to any one, “I saw some of your children to-day”, he might be justified in inferring that I did not see them all, not because the words mean it, but because, if I had seen them all, it is most likely that I should have said so: though even this cannot be presumed unless it is presupposed that I must have known whether the children I saw were all or not.
(Mill 1865: 442, also cited by Horn 2009)One century later, it was H. Paul Grice who saw that this simple idea contains the gist of a general framework for pragmatics, based on the premiss that discourse is a joint project undertaken by speakers who expect each other to be cooperative. It is this expectation, according to Grice, which gives rise to the pragmatic inferences he calls “conversational implicatures”. The inference Mill refers to is such an implicature; more specifically, it is a quantity implicature.
If it is so simple, why does it take a book to explain? There are several reasons.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Quantity Implicatures , pp. 1 - 4Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010