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Varieties of conventional implicature

Paper · 2010 · Elin McCready

Summary

The paper tackles a gap in Potts's (2005) logic L CI, which models conventionally implicated and expressive (CIE) meaning only as add-on content that sits beside the main, at-issue claim. Some single words carry both kinds of meaning at once. The pejorative Kraut, for example, both predicates German nationality and signals the speaker's contempt. Other expressions seem to deliver only expressive content as the whole point of an utterance. L CI's type system cannot assign such items one lexical entry without breaking words into hidden morphemes, and McCready argues this is costly and unattractive as a general strategy. Instead, she extends the logic to L + CI. It adds shunting types, which carry expressive content forward and use up their input, and mixed types, which are products pairing at-issue and shunting components. New combination rules are added for each. The extended system is applied to:

  • pejoratives
  • formal and informal pronouns
  • benefactives and honorifics
  • stand-alone particles
  • the Japanese adverb yokumo
  • Quechua evidentials

The result is one compositional framework for meaning that is fully expressive, partly expressive or mixed.

Key points

  • The paper gives two criteria for mixed content. An expression must contribute both at-issue and CIE meaning, and it must do so as a single morpheme, so that both arrive at the same step of composition.
  • The paper relies mainly on two diagnostics to separate CIE from at-issue content, with scopelessness being the first.
  • The formal system is built in two layers:
    • L +S CI adds shunting types (e s, t s, s s and functional types built from them) plus rule R7.
    • The full L + CI adds mixed product types such as σ × ζ plus rules R8–R9.
  • The type system deliberately generates more types than the analyses need, following Potts's practice, because the range of mixed expressions across languages is not yet known.
  • The Quechua evidentials analysis follows Faller (2002) and uses the whole extended system. The paper ends by questioning whether non-at-issue content (honorifics, evidentials, particles) can be faithfully translated into languages that lack it.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. A single lexical entry can deliver a truth-conditional predicate and a speaker attitude together, instead of being split into hidden sub-morphemes; this keeps the lexicon honest about what each word does.
  • I2. Keep a separate channel for content that is not open to challenge, apart from what is asserted, so that negation or questions affect only the asserted part.
  • I3. Use behavioral tests, such as checking whether content escapes the scope of operators, to decide which meaning dimension a piece of content belongs to.
  • I4. Utterances made only of expressive material, such as stand-alone particles, are treated as complete contributions whose expressive content becomes the main content.
  • I5. The paper doubts that honorifics, evidentials and particles can be carried across languages that lack them.

For Mova

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

  • I1 (frames): prag could mark slurs, honorifics and evaluative nouns with two outputs: a normal predicate for the frame and a separate speaker-attitude record that is never asserted.
  • I2 (world): the text-world could store speaker attitudes and evidential sources in their own layer, so that negating a sentence about someone does not erase the speaker's expressed contempt.
  • I3 (learn): build negative-control test items in which a CIE word sits under negation or a conditional, and check that the pipeline does not flip the attitude.
  • I4 (frames): the speech-act classifier could assign interjection-only or particle-only turns a full expressive act, instead of leaving them empty for lack of a verb frame.
  • I5 (back): when translating or generating through the meta-world, Mova could flag CIE content it cannot render directly and paraphrase it explicitly, rather than silently dropping it.

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

Also on the byline: Aoyama Gakuin University.

📚 Shelves 5 Computer Science · 9,086 works Artificial Intelligence · 8,889 works Arts and Humanities · 9,296 works Language and Linguistics · 9,206 works Philosophy · 211 works

🧭 Topics 1 Implicature · 72 works

Cite

Cite as Elin McCready. 2010. Varieties of conventional implicature. Semantics and Pragmatics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3765/sp.3.8

@article{mccready2010varieties,
  title = {{Varieties of conventional implicature}},
  author = {Elin McCready},
  journal = {Semantics and Pragmatics},
  year = {2010},
  doi = {10.3765/sp.3.8},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.3.8}
}

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