There have been many works looking at the interaction between presuppositions and implicatures. The cases that have been best studied include cases where scalar items and presuppositional items interact (Sharvit and Gajewski 2008) and cases where items seem to compete on the basis of presuppositions (Maximize Presupposition!, Heim (1992)). Most of these works have either located themselves in the grammatical tradition or used the Exh operator to represent the desired outcome of pragmatic reasoning. In this talk, I raise the question of whether the desired outcome can in fact be derived from (reasonable extensions to) Grice’s maxims, as formalized in the neo-Gricean tradition of e.g. Sauerland (2004), Spector (2007).
(1) a. Sue is unaware that some employees are on holidays.
⇝ not all employees are on holidays
b. Sue is aware that some employees are on holidays.
⇝ not all employees are on holidays
(2) a. Sue believes I have a brother. (competes with Sue knows I have a brother)
⇝ I don’t have a brother
b. All of my brothers have degrees in chemistry. (competes with Both of my brothers have degrees in chemistry)
⇝ I have more than two brothers
The conclusion of this preliminary work is negative. While ignorance inferences are usually thought to be the outcome of pragmatic reasoning (with the exception of Meyer (2013)), the ignorance inferences associated with examples like (3) cannot be derived from (reasonable reinterpretations of) the Maxim of Quantity. In addition, it seems anti-presuppositions can participate in Hurford-like implicatures (e.g. (4)) and this raises issues similar to that raised by ordinary Hurford disjunctions. Taken together, these facts may be taken as evidence in favor of a grammatical approach to these phenomena. Yet, I will conclude by showing that, while more successful, certain grammatical approaches also face issues with variants of these examples.
(3) Context: there are only two types of intelligent beings: elves, who are born with pointy ears, and humans, born with round ears.
Either Alex’s human or they got their pointy ears trimmed.
⇝ speaker doesn’t know whether Alex is human or an elf
(4) In war, if both or all sides possess nuclear weapons in sufficient numbers, billions could die. (adapted from COCA)
⇝ in some cases, there are two sides to a war
⇝ in some cases, there are more than two sides to a war
Heim, Irene. 1992. “Presupposition Projection and the Semantics of Attitude Verbs.” Journal of Semantics 9 (3): 183–221.
Meyer, Marie-Christine. 2013. “Ignorance and Grammar.” PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Sauerland, Uli. 2004. “Scalar Implicatures in Complex Sentences.” Linguistics and Philosophy 27 (3): 367–91.
Sharvit, Yael, and Jon Gajewski. 2008. “On the Calculation of Local Implicatures.” In Proceedings of WCCFL, 26:411–19.
Spector, Benjamin. 2007. “Scalar Implicatures: Exhaustivity and Gricean Reasoning.” In Questions in Dynamic Semantics, 225–49. Brill.