July 16, 2010: Uli Sauerland

Time:: 4:30pm, July 16, 2010
Place:: University of Tokyo, Komaba I Campus,
Building 18, Collaboration Room 2
Speaker:: Uli Sauerland (Center for General Linguistics, Berlin)
Title:: Quality and Quantity
Abstract:: The maxims of quality and the first maxim of quantity (see below) are the essential assumptions from which any Gricean account of implicatures proceeds. However, there are more possibilities to construe this interaction than is standardly assumed, and I want to argue for a novel variant of the Gricean approach promoting quality 1 over quality 2. The standard Gricean account assumes that listeners assume in a violation of quantity 1 that the speaker's need to satisfy quality 2 was the reason. But this runs into trouble with free choice phenomena as especially Fox (2007) has shown. I introduce instead an approach that assumes the primarily quality 1 is blamed for violations of quantity, and only if that assumption is unreasonable, listeners revert to quantity 2. I show that the new approach solves the free choice problem within the Gricean approach. I conclude by reviewing other recent data bearing on the computation of implicatures, specifically experimental data by Chemla (2009) and Chemla & Spector (to appear).

Semantics Research Group
Sponsored by the Global COE program Center for Advanced Research on Logic and Sensibility, Keio University

Semantics Research Group Meeting, July 16, 2010