The logic of conventional implicatures / Christopher Potts.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Potts, Christopher, 1977-

Series:

Oxford studies in theoretical linguistics ; 7.

Oxford studies in theoretical linguistics ; 7

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Speech acts (Linguistics).

Implication (Logic).

Language and languages--Philosophy.

Language and languages.

Physical Description:

xii, 246 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2005.

Summary:

This book revives the study of conventional implicatures in natural language semantics. H. Paul Grice first defined the concept. Since then his definition has seen much use and many redefinitions, but it has never enjoyed a stable place in linguistic theory. Christopher Potts returns to the original and uses it as a key into two presently under-studied areas of natural language: supplements (appositives, parentheticals) and expressives (e.g., honorifics, epithets). The account of both depends on a theory in which sentence meanings can be multidimensional. The theory is logically and intuitively compositional, and it minimally extends a familiar kind of intensional logic, thereby providing an adaptable, highly useful tool for semantic analysis. The result is a linguistic theory that is accessible not only to linguists of all stripes, but also philosophers of language, logicians, and computer scientists who have linguistic applications in mind.

Contents:

2 A preliminary case for conventional implicatures 5

2.1 A fresh look at an old definition 5

2.2 A brief history 8

2.3 Factual support for CIs 13

2.3.1 Supplemental expressions 13

2.3.2 Expressives 16

2.4 Kinds of meaning 22

2.4.1 CIs versus conversational implicatures 26

2.4.2 CIs versus at-issue entailments 30

2.4.3 CIs versus presuppositions 32

2.4.4 CIs versus intonational meanings 36

2.4.5 Closing remarks on kinds of meaning 37

2.5 Indirect entailments of the CI definition 41

2.5.1 Scopelessness (or widest scope) 42

2.5.2 Multidimensionality 42

2.5.3 Antibackgrounding 43

2.5.4 Comment upon an at-issue core 43

3 A logic for conventional implicatures 47

3.2 Independence of truth values 49

3.3 A meaning language distinction 51

3.4 At-issue and CI types 55

3.5 Linguistic motivation for the limited set of types 57

3.5.1 At-issue never applies to CI 58

3.5.2 CI never applies to CI 60

3.6 Modes of composition 61

3.6.1 At-issue functional application 62

3.6.2 At-issue intersection 63

3.6.3 CI application 64

3.6.4 Isolated CIs 65

3.6.5 Features 66

3.6.6 Parsetree interpretation 67

3.7 Remarks on appeals to a meaning language 69

3.8 Discourse structures 73

3.8.1 The discourse layer 73

3.8.2 The lower layer 75

3.8.3 Interpretation 75

3.9 The heritage function 77

3.10 The 'binding' problem (or virtue) 79

3.11 One-dimensional translations 82

3.12 A note on resource sensitivity 85

4.1 Remarks 89

4.2 Some descriptive terminology 91

4.2.1 The term 'supplement' 92

4.2.2 The pieces of nominal appositives 93

4.2.3 Relative clause nomenclature 93

4.3 The analysis in brief 97

4.4 A conservative syntax 103

4.4.1 Adjacency 104

4.4.2 Right adjunction 106

4.4.3 Case marking 107

4.5 Basic semantic properties 111

4.5.1 Nondeniable meanings 111

4.5.2 Antibackgrounding 112

4.5.3 Nonrestrictiveness 113

4.5.4 Scopelessness 114

4.5.5 Definites and indefinites 119

4.6 The internal structure of NAs 122

4.6.1 The anchor 122

4.6.2 The appositive 131

4.6.3 Comma intonation 133

4.6.4 There are no inverted cases 136

4.6.5 NAs summed up 138

4.7 Supplementary adverbs 138

4.7.1 Speaker-oriented adverbs 139

4.7.2 Topic-oriented adverbs 143

4.7.3 Utterance modifiers 145

5 Expressive content 153

5.1 Composition and denotation 153

5.2 A working definition 155

5.3 Expressive adjectives and epithets 158

5.3.1 An undistinguished syntax 163

5.3.2 Lexical meanings 165

5.4 Quantifiers and a variable environment dimension 173

5.5 A scope-shifting alternative 177

5.6 Honorifics in Japanese 179

5.6.1 Argument-oriented honorification 181

5.6.2 Performative honorifics 184

5.7 German Konjunktiv I 186

6 The supplement relation: A syntactic alternative 195

6.1 Remarks 195

6.2 McCawley's (1998) analysis 196

6.3 The coordinate interpreted structure 198

6.4 The transformational mapping 200

6.5 The surface 201

6.5.1 Trees 202

6.5.2 Supplements and dominance 203

6.5.3 Supplements and the supplement relation 205

6.5.4 Interpreting supplement structures 207

7 A look outside Grice's definition 211

7.1 Neighboring territory 211

7.2 Minus conventionality 211

7.3 Minus commitment 212

7.4 Minus speaker orientation 213

7.5 Minus independence 217

Appendix The logics L[subscript CI] and L[subscript U] 219

A.2 The logic L[subscript CI] 219

A.2.1 The syntax of L[subscript CI] 219

A.2.2 Semantic parsetrees 224

A.2.3 Semantic parsetree interpretation 224

A.2.4 Intensional models for L[subscript CI] 224

A.2.5 Interpretation for L[subscript CI] 225

A.3 The logic L[subscript U] 225

A.3.1 Syntax of L[subscript U] 225

A.3.2 Discourse structures 226

A.4 Interpretation for L[subscript CI] and L[subscript U] 227.

Notes:

Revision of PhD thesis submitted to University of California, Santa Cruz 2003.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

ISBN:

0199273820

0199273839

OCLC:

56964776