conventional implicature: summary

[Marta Carretero]

On Fri, 28 Nov 1997, Marta Carretero wrote:

        Before I write the summary, I must thank all those of you who
answered my question of whether conventional implicature could be
considered, after all, as part of the lexical meaning. I am sorry in
advance for not doing justice for all your suggestions, especially
concerning Lakoff's and Harder's excellent contributions. For reasons of
time, the summary will only pay attention to those contributions
sent personally to me. If someone wishes to have access to Harder's or
Lakoff's replies, I could forward the messages.

>       Dear 'funknetters':
>
>       I am a teacher of linguistics at the Universidad Complutense,
> Madrid, and one of my subjects is pragmatics, of which my students are 5th
> year undergraduates. Now I am teaching cooperation and implicature, as in
> Grice's proposal, and soon I will come across the notion of 'conventional
> implicature'. I am beginning to think that what comes under the label
> 'conventional implicature' (for instance, BUT and HOWEVER carry the
> 'implicature' that what follows will run counter to expectations) could
> well be included in the LEXICAL MEANING of these items, since these
> 'implicatures' are independent of context and persist in all the uses of
> these words. I would appreciate it very much if some of you could send me
> messages about your views on this subject.
>
>       Thank you very much in advance.
>

No 1.
Yes, that's precisely why Grice clled them *conventional*. The problem is
that they do not appear to contribute to the truth-conditional meaning of
the sentences din which they occur - this is why he called them
*implicatures*.

No. 2
Yes, I (mostly) agree. I take the linguistic vs extralinguistic
distinction to be the main distinction (rather than the + / - truth
functional, which is what informs Grice's distinction between semantic
meaning and conventional implicature)...
However, cognitively, conventioonal implicatures, or a subset of them, may
have a different status. It's probably due to their "late" development out
of conversational implicatures. (...) I don't expect a status difference
between the meaning of 'because' and 'but', but I believe I have found
some distributional differences in Hebrew particles I can trace to that. I
am now conducting experiments to find out whether subjects' responses to
conventionally implicated meaning and to semantic meaning is different (in
speed).


No. 3
I think you're certainly right that conventional implicatures are part of
the lexical meaning of words like 'but'. However, since Grice there has
been some interesting work done on theñm, in particular by D. Blakemore.
She points out the limitations of Grice's account (in a sensse all he does
is label them rather than explain them). and develops a new account in
terms of relevance-theory and, in particular, the relevance-theoretic
notion of procedural meaning.

No. 4
in my view, that is exactly what conventional implicature means.The only
thing is, that the meaning is not part of the truth-functional meaning of
the sentence. And that holds, in Grice's view, for 'but' and 'however'.

No. 5
... it must be noted that the semantic dimension of connectors is
important. However, the work by Grice and many others has demonstrated the
pragmatic character of the connectors. That is, they take their sense by
context.

No. 6
Your question about Gricean conventional implicature is a very reasonable
one, which is usually not asked because researchers have tended to ignore
conventional implicature (or to call it something else and ignore its
Gricean roots). The problem is that 'implicature' has mainly been used as
a shorthand for 'conversational implicature', and thus has become defined
as 'defeasible aspects of meaning'. But it's clear that Grice recognized
that conventional implicatures were NOT defeasible, and that he meang
"implicature" to cover ALL non-truth-conditional aspects of meaning,
including meaning both encoded and not encoded by linguistic form. So,
among other ways, one can choose to slice up meaning using
truth-conditions as the relevant parameters (as Grice did `..), or by
using encoding into form (or defeasibility) as the relevant parameter. The
latter way conceives meaning as gradient instead of binary (...), and thus
also find a place for Grice's briefly-noted distinction between
'particularized' and 'generalized' conversational implicatures, on a scale
of integration of meaning into form.

Bibliography suggested:
-(to appear) Jucker and Ziv, eds. 'Discourse markers'. John Benjamins.
-Levinson (1995) in Palmer ed 'Grammar and meaning'
-Relevance theory people (Carston
        -Blakemore (1992) Understanding Utterances. Blackwell.
        -'Postface' to Sperber and Wilson (1995) revised ed. of
        'Relevance'
        -Blakemore, D. (1987) Semantic Constraints on Relevance. Oxford:
        Blackwell.
-Green G. (1989) Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding. Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale NJ.
-Levinson (1983) Pragmatics. CUP.
-Thomas, J. (1996) Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics.
London: Longman.
-Articles and books by Jacques Moeschler and Jean-Marc Luscher, from the
University of Geneva.
-Berkeleyan Construction Grammar, e.g. in Fillmore, Kay and O'Connor
(1988) paper on 'let alone' in Language, or other papers by Fillmore, Kay,
Sweetser, and others.
-Alternative proposal: work by Oswald Ducrot and on Argumentation
theory in general.
-Schiffrin, D. Discourse markers.
-Kroon, Caroline (1995) on causal and adversative Discourse markers in
Latin, with a survey of the existing literature (Amsterdam: Gieben).
-The Way of Words, Harvard University Press, 1989 (contains Grice's entire
manuscript on implicatures).

> Marta Carretero
> Departamento de Filologia Inglesa
> Facultad de Filologia - Edificio A
> Universidad Complutense
> 28040 - Madrid.
>
>