Chilton, Part 1 (chapter 3)

[Linnea Micciulla]

I thought the section headed, "The politics of particularized implicatures"
in Chapter 3 (p. 37) was quite thought-provoking. The claim, "...the
inferences that save the maxims and the CP can only arise if the hearer
adopts a particular ideology..."  is certainly a very powerful one.  This
process seems to have 2 critical features: first, the hearer is pushed
towards the speaker's ideology in order to make sense of the utterance, and
secondly, this process is potentially unconscious - and even innate?  Could
one argue that the CP (Cooperative Principle) is a built-in part of human
language/reasoning?
Chilton goes on to say, "The precise mental computations that a hearer goes
through to arrive at the implicature are not well understood - but they
presumably involve quite complex stores of knowledge about human
behavior."  I think it's quite interesting to consider how the knowledge-
base/common ground is affected by the need for the hearer to (at least
temporarily) accommodate the speaker's ideology.

Looking forward to hearing other thoughts about Part 1!

Linnea