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The Dynamics of Sense and Implicature

Martin, Scott

Abstract Details

2013, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Linguistics.
This thesis is a both a descriptive and theoretical examination of implicatures, parts of the contextual meanings of utterances that are separate from their sense, their main point. The empirical taxonomy I describe draws on the work of Grice (1975), but fleshes out two important subcategories of implicature that he did not discuss in detail. One of these subcategories is the conventional implicatures, which contains definite anaphora, iterative adverbs, honorifics, and Potts's (2005) "CIs": nominal appositives, nonrestrictive relative clauses, as-parentheticals, and expressives. The other is the nonconventional implicatures apart from Grice's conversational implicatures, which contains lexical items often construed as bearing presuppositions, such as so-called factive verbs, aspectuals, and achievements. I offer evidence that what distinguishes the class of anaphora from other conventional implicatures is that the use of a definite must be anchored to the speaker, since it bears the implication that an antecedent is retrievable in the discourse context. This new characterization of the landscape of implicatures holds significant consequences for semantic theory. The notion of contextual felicity usually assumed to apply to presuppositions is generalized to a mechanism that accounts for the (in)felicity of all conventional implicatures on the basis of whether their content conflicts with entailments present in the discourse context. For the nonanaphoric implicatures, the choice between anchoring their implicature to the speaker or to an embedded perspective is influenced in part by this new notion of contextual felicity. Since it places nonanaphoric lexical items usually thought to be presuppositional under the category of nonconventional implicatures, the terms presupposition and anaphora become synonymous. As a corollary, the process of presupposition accommodation (Lewis, 1979) takes on a more limited role than is usually thought. I formalize insights from this new taxonomy of implicatures in a dynamic semantics that follows on the work of Heim (1982), Beaver (2001), and de Groote (2006), among others. This formal theory is dynamic in the sense that utterances are modeled as both updating the discourse context and depending on it for their own interpretation. It is also compositional in Montague's (1973) sense: meanings of phrases are built up based on the meanings of their component lexical items and the way they are syntactically combined. Rather than the single meaning level usually assumed by semantic theories, the dynamic semantics developed here uses a two-level scheme for separating the sense of expressions from their implicatures, following Karttunen and Peters (1979). This dynamic semantics is embedded within a categorial grammar that separates word order from combinatorics, based on ideas originally due to Curry (1961). The grammar is in turn built upon the solid, well-understood, mainstream mathematical foundations of dependent type theory and linear logic. I then apply this semantics to build a robust account of anaphora that adopts the perspective that definites give rise to an implication of retrievability of their antecedent, rather than bearing presuppositions, as they are usually treated. The notion of anaphoric accessibility common to dynamic theories is extended by implementing Roberts's (2003) weak familiarity in the account, broadening its empirical coverage to instances in which a definite's antecedent is merely entailed to exist, but not overtly mentioned. The semantics is then extended to handle both the weak and strong readings of determiners in a contextually dependent way. Potts's (2005) CIs are also modeled by using essentially the same mechanism as the one that captures the implicatures associated with anaphora. I show how the formal theory I develop here represents a considerable advance with respect to Potts's, due largely to a more empirically adequate treatment of anaphoric links between CIs and the discourse in which they are situated. I argue that the theory I develop in this thesis compares favorably with other attempts to treat similar phenomena. In addition to clarifying the empirical status of implicatures through a new meaning taxonomy that extends Grice's original, its formal rigor provides an explicit scientific theory of conventional implicature that is falsifiable, in the sense of making predictions to which counterexamples could in principle be given. I speculate about how the theory might be extended to account for even more phenomena, and argue that it is very well suited to computational implementation for various applications.
Carl Pollard (Advisor)
Craige Roberts (Advisor)
Michael White (Committee Member)
460 p.

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Citations

  • Martin, S. (2013). The Dynamics of Sense and Implicature [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1377010890

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Martin, Scott. The Dynamics of Sense and Implicature. 2013. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1377010890.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Martin, Scott. "The Dynamics of Sense and Implicature." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1377010890

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)