On the multidimensionality of natural language semantics and the myth of conventional implicature

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Dr. Yasutada Sudo (University College London)
• Thursday 16 May 2019, 17:00-18:30
• GR06/07, Faculty of English, 9 West Rd (Sidgwick Site).

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Yixin Zhang.

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.

This talk is part of the Cambridge University Linguistic Society (LingSoc) series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Cambridge Forum of Science and Humanities
• Cambridge Language Sciences
• Cambridge University Linguistic Society (LingSoc)
• Cambridge talks
• Chris Davis' list
• GR06/07, Faculty of English, 9 West Rd (Sidgwick Site)
• Guy Emerson's list
• Language Sciences for Graduate Students

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.