Implicature, Inference and Cancellability
The standard position in pragmatics to date has been that cancellability is useful way of differentiating implicatures from logical implications, semantic entailments and the like. In recent years, however, there has been considerable debate as to whether
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Abstract The standard position in pragmatics to date has been that cancellability is useful way of differentiating implicatures from logical implications, semantic entailments and the like. In recent years, however, there has been considerable debate as to whether implicatures are in fact always cancellable, or indeed whether they are cancellable at all, amongst linguistic pragmaticians and language philosophers. In this chapter, it is suggested that cancellability encompasses a range of actions that play out in different ways depending on whether we are analysing inferences that can lead to implicatures or the implicatures themselves. In this way, we can see how analysts have often underplayed the contingency of inferences as well as the inherent indeterminacy of implicatures in such debates. It is concluded that cancellability should be the subject of further empirically-driven analyses in order to provide a solid foundation for the theorization of implicature.
1 Introduction In introducing the theory of conversational implicature, Grice made three key claims, each of which has subsequently become the subject of considerable debate in pragmatics. First, Grice claimed that the inferences underlying conversational implicatures are made in a principled way. In other words, conversational implicatures are made available to recipients by speakers with reference to normative assumptions about the nature of cooperative interaction (cf. Bianchi this volume). Grice formalised this claim in postulating the Cooperative Principle and four
M. Haugh (&) School of Languages and Linguistics, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia e-mail: [email protected]
A. Capone et al. (eds.), Perspectives on Pragmatics and Philosophy, Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology 1, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-01011-3_6, Ó Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013
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related conversational maxims. Second, conversational implicatures are generated through ordinary reasoning (as opposed to strict logical reasoning), either once-off reasoning in a particular context (nonce inferencing), or regularised or conventionalised reasoning across contexts (default inferencing). Third, since conversational implicatures arise through ordinary as opposed to strictly logical reasoning, these inferences are defeasible, from which it follows that a putative implicature can always be cancelled. Grice argued that a conversational implicature can be cancelled in two different ways. Explicit cancellation involves adding a subsequent cancellation clause that either retracts the implicature (e.g., “not that I mean [to imply x]”) or blocks it from arising in the first place (e.g., “in fact [not x]”. Contextual cancellation involves finding situations in which the putative implicature would not arise (Grice 1989: 44). The standard position in pragmatics to date has thus been that implicatures are cancellable through explicit and/or contextual cancellation, and that the “cancellability test” is useful way of differentiating impl
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