Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2026 / Implicating without intentions

Implicating without intentions

Paper · 2026 · Paul Marty

Summary

Note: the PDF header gives the title as "Implicating with commitment". This theoretical pragmatics paper asks whether scalar implicatures (SIs), such as "some" suggesting "not all", can be explained without attributing beliefs and intentions to the speaker. Neo-Gricean accounts derive SIs from what the speaker believes. Building on Geurts's (2019) sketch, Marty recasts the Gricean maxims of Quality and Quantity in terms of commitments the speaker takes on or holds back. A first version runs into trouble over how strong private and social commitments are and how they relate. The revised model therefore separates an agent's private commitments from their practical disposition to share them publicly. This handles ordinary scalar inferences. It also covers cases where a speaker keeps part of their private stance hidden because other norms press against full disclosure, which belief-based models handle poorly. The account extends naturally beyond assertions to questions and directives. It also explains cross-cultural variation, such as Malagasy speakers routinely giving less information than they have, as different Transparency assumptions rather than different maxims.

Key points

  • The paper contrasts the mentalist, intention-based tradition (Grice, Soames, Sperber & Wilson) with the normative, commitment-based tradition (Brandom, Krifka, Geurts), in which common ground is a network of mutual commitments.
  • The baseline is NG-Quality and NG-Quantity. It yields a weak "primary" implicature (the speaker lacks the belief that ALL). The stronger "secondary" implicature (the speaker believes not-ALL) is reached only through an added opinionatedness assumption.
  • The revised model uses a Reflexivity principle for commitment, a commitment-based Quantity maxim, and Transparency assumptions. These are socially licensed expectations about which private commitments get shared, and in which contexts.
  • The target data are partially opaque speaker stances discussed by Fox 2014, Marty 2018, Agyemang 2020 and Marty et al. 2022, plus Keenan's (1976) Malagasy example, in which a speaker places someone at home or in the marketplace without saying which.
  • The author proposes a possible "Matrix C hypothesis": a commitment-indexed counterpart to Meyer's (2013) Matrix K operator. Unlike K, it would not be limited to assertions.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The model separates what a speaker is privately committed to from whether they are disposed to make that commitment public, so a missing stronger claim need not mean "the speaker believes it false."
  • I2. Implicature strength is graded: a weak inference ("not committed to ALL") becomes a strong one ("committed to not-ALL") only when an explicit extra assumption licenses it.
  • I3. Contextual factors such as how costly the information is, face threat, and social distance switch the Transparency assumption on or off, while the Quantity maxim itself stays universal.
  • I4. Commitments, unlike beliefs, also apply to questions and directives, which gives one uniform object for implicatures across speech acts.
  • I5. Keenan's Malagasy case shows that whether an implicature arises can depend on cultural norms.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): crate prag could record, for each scalar implicature, both the private stance and a separate transparency flag, rather than writing one belief straight into the world.
  • I2 (frames): the implicature step could output the weak reading by default and derive the strong one only when an opinionatedness or transparency condition fires, logging which condition did so for explainability.
  • I3 (world): the world of a story could hold relationship and stakes attributes between characters, which prag consults before treating a vague answer as signalling ignorance.
  • I4 (frames): the speech-act layer could attach implicatures to commitment records of any speech-act type, so the same mechanism covers questions and commands in dialogues from fables.
  • I5 (learn): this case could serve as a negative control in evaluation, checking that the system does not fire a scalar or ignorance inference when context says withholding is normal.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🔬Centro de LinguísticaLisbon · Portugal2 works · 7 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPhilosophy · 284 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Implicature · 138 works

Cite

Cite as Paul Marty. 2026. Implicating without intentions. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.26704

@article{marty2026implicating,
  title = {{Implicating without intentions}},
  author = {Paul Marty},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.26704},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.26704}
}

References

68 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Agyemang, Cathy. 2020. Scalar implicatures under uncertainty. Carleton University MA thesis. DOI: https://doi.org/10.22215/etd/2020-14272 ↗
  2. Bach, Kent & Harnish, Robert M. 1979. Communication and speech acts. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500008691 ↗
  3. Bar-Lev, Moshe E. & Fox, Danny. 2020. Free choice, simplification, and innocent inclusion. Natural Language Semantics 28(3). 175–223. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-020-09162-y ↗
  4. Beckman, Mary E. & Ayers Elam, Gayle. 1997. Guidelines for ToBI labelling (version 3.0). The Ohio State University Research Foundation. Available at http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/research/ phonetics/E_ToBI/ Beckman, Mary E. & Pierrehumbert, Janet B. 1986. Intonational structure in Japanese and English. Phonology Yearbook 3. 255–309. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S095267570000066X ↗
  5. Brandom, Robert. 1983. Asserting. Noûs 17. 637–650. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/2215086 ↗
  6. Brandom, Robert. 1997. Replies. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57(1). 189–204. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/2953789 ↗
  7. Brandom, Robert B. 1994. Making it explicit: Reasoning, representing, and discursive commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. find
  8. Bratman, Michael. 1987. Intention, plans, and practical reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. find
  9. Breheny, Richard & Klinedinst, Nathan & Romoli, Jacopo & Sudo, Yasutada. 2018. The symmetry problem: Current theories and prospects. Natural Language Semantics 26. 85–110. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-017-9141-z ↗
  10. Chemla, Emmanuel. 2008. An anti-introduction to presuppositions. In Egré, Paul & Magri, Giorgio (eds.), Presuppositions and Implicatures: Proceedings of MIT-France Workshop on Scalar Implicature and Presupposition, vol. 60 (MIT Working Papers in Linguistics). MIT. http://paulegre.free.fr/ Papers/tocintro_mitwpl.pdf Chierchia, Gennaro & Fox, Danny & Spector, Benjamin. 2012. Scalar implicature as a grammatical phenomenon. Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning 3. 2297–2331. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110253382.2297 ↗
  11. Clark, Herbert H. 1996. Using language. Cambridge University Press. find
  12. Clark, Herbert H. 2006. Social actions, social commitments. In Enfield, Nick J. & Levinson, Stephen C. (eds.), Roots of human sociality: Culture, cognition and interaction 126–150. Oxford: Berg. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003135517-6 ↗
  13. Constant, Noah. 2012. English rise-fall-rise: A study in the semantics and pragmatics of intonation. Linguistics and Philosophy 35. 407–442. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-012-9121-1 ↗
  14. Degano, Marco & Marty, Paul & Ramotowska, Sonia & Aloni, Maria & Breheny, Richard & Romoli, Jacopo & Sudo, Yasutada. 2025. The ups and downs of ignorance. Natural Language Semantics 33(1). 1–41. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-024-09226-3 ↗
  15. Fox, Danny. 2007. Free choice and the theory of scalar implicatures. In Sauerland, Uli & Stateva, Penka (eds.), Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics 71–120. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230210752_4 ↗
  16. Fox, Danny. 2014. Cancelling the maxim of quantity: Another challenge for a gricean theory of scalar implicatures. Semantics and Pragmatics 7(5). 1–20. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.7.5 ↗
  17. Fox, Danny & Katzir, Roni. 2011. On the characterization of alternatives. Natural Language Semantics 19. 87–107. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-010-9065-3 ↗
  18. Gazdar, Gerald. 1979. Pragmatics: Implicature, presupposition, and logical form. New York: Academic Press. find
  19. Geurts, Bart. 2018. Making sense of self talk. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 9. 271–285. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-017-0375-y ↗
  20. Geurts, Bart. 2019a. Commitments continued. Theoretical Linguistics 45(1-2). 111–125. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/tl-2019-0009 ↗
  21. Geurts, Bart. 2019b. Communication as commitment sharing: Speech acts, implicatures, common ground. Theoretical Linguistics 45(1-2). 1–30. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/tl-2019-0001 ↗
  22. Geurts, Bart. 2020. Common ground as a normative condition. Manuscript, Radboud University. https://www.researchgate . net / publication / 341775194 _ Common _ ground _ as _ a _ normative _ condition Geurts, Bart. 2024. Common Ground in Pragmatics. In Zalta, Edward N. & Nodelman, Uri (eds.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. ↗
  23. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University Winter 2024 edn. find
  24. Grice, H. Paul. 1957. Meaning. The Philosophical Review 66(3). 377–388. DOI: https://doi.org/10. 2307/2182440 ↗
  25. Grice, H. Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Speech acts 41–58. Brill. DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.1163/9789004368811_003 ↗
  26. Grice, H. Paul. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard University Press. find
  27. Hamblin, Charles L. 1976. Questions in Montague English. In Patee, Barbara H. (ed.), Montague Grammar 247–259. Academic Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-545850-4.50014-5 ↗
  28. Horn, Laurence R. 1984. Toward a New Taxonomy for Pragmatic Inference: Q-Based and R-Based Implicature. In Schiffrin, Deborah (ed.), Meaning, form, and use in context: Linguistic applications 11–42. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. find
  29. Horn, Laurence R. 1989. A natural history of negation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. find
  30. Horn, Laurence R. 2004. Implicature. In Horn, Laurence R. & Ward, Gregory (eds.), The handbook of pragmatics 3–28. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/ 9780470756959.ch1 ↗
  31. Joyce, James M. 1998. A nonpragmatic vindication of probabilism. Philosophy of Science 65(4). 575–603. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/392661 ↗
  32. Katzir, Roni. 2007. Structurally-defined alternatives. Linguistics and Philosophy 30. 669–690. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-008-9029-y ↗
  33. Keenan, Elinor O. 1976. The universality of conversational postulates. Language in Society 5(1). 67–80. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500006850 ↗
  34. Kibble, Rodger. 2006a. Reasoning about propositional commitments in dialogue. Research on Language and Computation 4. 179–202. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11168-006-9003-1 ↗
  35. Kibble, Rodger. 2006b. Speech acts, commitment and multi-agent communication. Computational & Mathematical Organization Theory 12(2). 127–145. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10588-006-9540-z ↗
  36. Krifka, Manfred. 2015. Bias in commitment space semantics: Declarative questions, negated questions, and question tags. Semantics and Linguistic Theory 328–345. DOI: https://doi.org/10. 3765/salt.v25i0.3078 ↗
  37. Krifka, Manfred & Hartmann, Jutta M. & Wollstein, Angelika. 2023. Layers of assertive clauses: Propositions, judgements, commitments, acts. Propositionale Argumente im Sprachvergleich: Theorie und Empirie 84. 115–181. find
  38. Kroch, Anthony. 1972. Lexical and inferred meanings for some time adverbs. Quarterly Progress Report 104. Cambridge, MA: Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT. find
  39. Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10. 1017/cbo9780511813313 ↗
  40. Levinson, Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. The MIT Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/5526.001.0001 ↗
  41. Lewis, David K. 1969. Convention: A philosophical study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. find
  42. Martinich, Aloysius P. 1980. Conversational maxims and some philosophical problems. The Philosophical Quarterly 30(120). 215–228. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/2219243 ↗
  43. Marty, Paul. 2017. Implicatures Technology dissertation. in the DP domain. Massachusetts Institute of Marty, Paul. 2018. An epistemic step for presuppositional implicatures? Invited talk at the workshop ‘Scalar Implicatures: Formal and Experimental Exploration’, June 2018, University of Siena. find
  44. Marty, Paul & Romoli, Jacopo. 2021. Presupposed free choice and the theory of scalar implicatures. Linguistics and Philosophy 45. 95–152. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-020-09316-5 ↗
  45. Marty, Paul & Romoli, Jacopo & Sudo, Yasutada & Breheny, Richard. 2022. Implicating in semi-cooperative contexts. Unpublished manuscript. https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/006698/current.pdf? _s=egpYkNuJAFiQOWes Marty, Paul & Romoli, Jacopo & Sudo, Yasutada & Breheny, Richard. 2024. What makes linguistic inferences robust? Journal of Semantics 41(1). 1–52. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffad010 Meyer, Marie-Christine. Technology dissertation. 2013. Ignorance and grammar. Massachusetts Institute of Nicolae, Andreea C. & Petrenco, Aliona & Tsilia, Anastasia & Marty, Paul. 2024a. Do languages have exclusive disjunctions? Open Mind 8. 1469–1485. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_ 00175 ↗
  46. Nicolae, Andreea C. & Petrenco, Aliona & Tsilia, Anastasia & Marty, Paul. 2024b. Exclusivity and exhaustivity of disjunction(s): A cross-linguistic study. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 28. 1098–1113. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18148/sub/2024.v28.1184 ↗
  47. Pierrehumbert, Janet & Hirschberg, Julia. 1990. The meaning of intonational contours in the interpretation of discourse. In Cohen, Philip R. & Morgan, Jerry & Pollack, Martha E. (eds.), Intentions in communication. The MIT Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3839.003. 0016 ↗
  48. Pierrehumbert, Janet B. 1980. The Phonology and Phonetics of English Intonation. Massachusetts Institute of Technology dissertation. find
  49. Romoli, Jacopo. 2012. Soft but Strong: Neg-raising, Soft Triggers, and Exhaustification. Harvard University dissertation. find
  50. Sauerland, Uli. 2004. Scalar implicatures in complex sentences. Linguistics and Philosophy 27. 367–391. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:LING.0000023378.71748.db ↗
  51. Searle, John R. 1969. Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139173438 ↗
  52. Searle, John R. & Vanderveken, Daniel. 1985. Foundations of illocutionary logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
  53. Segerberg, Krister. 1984. Towards an exact philosophy of action. Topoi 3(1). 75–83. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00136122 ↗
  54. Silverman, Kim & Beckman, Mary & Pitrelli, John & Ostendorf, Mari & Wightman, Colin & Price, Patti & Pierrehumbert, Janet B. & Hirschberg, Julia. 1992. ToBI: A standard for labeling English prosody. Proceedings of the 1992 International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. 867–870. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21437/ICSLP.1992-260 ↗
  55. Singh, Munindar P. 2000. A social semantics for agent communication languages. In Dignum, Frank & Greaves, Mark (eds.), Issues in agent communication 31–45. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/10722777_3 ↗
  56. Skyrms, Brian. 1987. Dynamic coherence and probability kinematics. Philosophy of Science 54(1). 1–20. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/289350 ↗
  57. Soames, Scott. 1982. How presuppositions are inherited: A solution to the projection problem. Linguistic Inquiry 13(3). 483–545. find
  58. Spector, Benjamin. 2007. Scalar implicatures: Exhaustivity and gricean reasoning. In Aloni, Maria & Butler, Alastair & Dekker, Paul (eds.), Questions in Dynamic Semantics, vol. 17 (Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface). Elsevier. Earlier version presented at ESSLLI 2003 Student Session. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9780080470993_011 ↗
  59. Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre. 1986. Relevance: Communication and cognition, vol. 142. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. find
  60. Stalnaker, Robert C. 1973. Presuppositions. Journal of Philosophical Logic 2(4). 447–457. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00262951 ↗
  61. Stalnaker, Robert C. 1978. Assertion. In Cole, Peter (ed.), Pragmatics 315–332. Brill. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004368873_013 ↗
  62. Stalnaker, Robert C. 2002. Common ground. Linguistics and Philosophy 25(5-6). 701–721. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1020867916902 ↗
  63. Stalnaker, Robert C. 2014. Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press. find
  64. Strawson, Peter F. 1964. Intention and convention in speech acts. The Philosophical Review 73(4). 439–460. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/2183301 ↗
  65. Tomlinson, John Michael & Ronderos, Camilo R. 2021. Does intonation automatically strengthen scalar implicatures? Semantics and Pragmatics 14(4). 1–30. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.14.4 ↗
  66. Tsvilodub, Polina & Marty, Paul & Ramotowska, Sonia & Romoli, Jacopo & Franke, Michael. 2024. Experimental pragmatics with machines: Testing LLM predictions for the inferences of plain and embedded disjunctions. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 46. 3960–3967. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7t58h8h3 ↗
  67. van Rooij, Robert & Schulz, Katrin. 2004. Exhaustive interpretation of complex sentences. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 13(4). 491–519. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10849-004-2118-6 ↗
  68. Ward, Gregory & Hirschberg, Julia. 1985. Implicating uncertainty: The pragmatics of fall-rise intonation. Language 61(4). 747–776. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/414489 ↗

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/marty-2026-implicating-without-intentions/