Pedro Santos

Universidade do Algarve

Are there any embedded conversational implicatures?

10 March 2017, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: There is a well-known kind of objection to Grice’s account of conversational implicatures (CI) — one which, while not threatening the very notion, identifies a problem with the way Grice and most of mainstream subsequent work in philosophy of language has implemented it.  The objection builds on cases of alleged conversational implicatures which seem to be generated from clauses which fall under the scope of some logical operator or propositional attitude verb. These apparently challenge Grice’s account of CIs, as it is arguably committed to CIs being generated from complete utterances, rather than from unasserted sub-clauses. This is then taken to generate a reductio argument against the possibility of embedded CIs, and hence to show that the data that allegedly exemplify them must be accounted for in some other way. In the talk I will review some of the recent discussion on the subject while trying to make sense of embedded CIs.