Grice coined the term ‘conventional implicature’ in a short passage in ‘Logic and conversation’. The description is intuitive and deeply intriguing. The range of phenomena that have since been assigned this label is large and diverse. I survey the central factual motivation, arguing that it is loosely uni- fied by the idea that conventional implicatures contribute a separate dimen- sion of meaning. I provide tests for distinguishing conventional implicatures from other kinds of meaning, and I briefly explore ways in which (...) one can incorporate multiple dimensions of meaning into a single theory. (shrink)

This paper concentrates on giving precise content to the general wisdom on the scalar presupposition of even, according to which the prejacent of even, p, is stronger than its relevant focus alternatives, q. To that end I first examine both familiar challenges for the popular ‘comparative likelihood’ view of the ‘stronger than’ relation, as well as novel challenges, having to do with the context dependency of even and with its sensitivity to standards of comparison. To overcome these challenges and to (...) account for the full range of data I develop a revised, ‘gradability-based’ scalar presupposition for even, which differs from the ‘comparative likelihood’ one in several respects: instead of directly comparing degrees to which propositions are more or less likely, we compare extents to which non-focus entities x in p and q exceed the salient standard on a scale associated with a contextually supplied gradable property G. To capture cases where information about contrastive topics is crucial for fixing two distinct standards on G, I follow theories which view even as a general, two-place alternative-sensitive operator, allowing it to associate with both focus and contrastive topics. Beyond the ability to account for a large range of intricate felicity variations and inferences found with even, a more general contribution of the paper lies in showing the linguistic relevance of tools originally developed in the literature on gradable predicates to the semantics of scalar alternative–sensitive particles. (shrink)

We discuss a phenomenon that appears when ‘even’ occurs in questions. Specifically, an inference of what we call “extreme ignorance” is projected onto the speaker. We argue that this effect arises when the known unlikelihood ‘even’ focuses an entire question, resulting in the focused question being the least likely to be asked. Specific implicatures then conspire to bring about the inference that the speaker does not know the answer to the question that is most expected to be known. The environments (...) explored are Wh-questions and Y/N questions, and the languages looked at primarily English, Greek, German and Russian. (shrink)

Grice’s distinction between what is said and what is implicated has greatly clarified our understanding of the boundary between semantics and pragmatics. Although border disputes still arise and there are certain difficulties with the distinction itself (see the end of §1), it is generally understood that what is said falls on the semantic side and what is implicated on the pragmatic side. But this applies only to what is..