Abstract

Natural language semantics is known to be multidimensional in the sense that linguistic utterances may convey different types of information at the same time, e.g. assertive meaning (aka at-issue meaning), presupposition, conversational implicature. In this talk we argue that what is called “conventional implicature” (aka “use-conditional meaning”) in the current literature since Christopher Potts’ seminal work (Potts 2005, McCready 2010, Gutzmann 2015, 2019) is not a homogenous class, and that the phenomena discussed under this rubric do not require a special compositional semantic theory of the kind that the authors cited here put forward. Instead, we claim that the relevant phenomena are analyzable in terms of at-issue meaning, presupposition, and a non-compositional kind of meaning, which we call “associative meaning” (cf. Leech 1981), and the category of conventional implicature in the sense intended by the above authors is dispensable.