The Logic of Conventional Implicatures

This book revives the study of conventional implicatures in natural language semantics. The label ‘conventional implicature’ dates back to H. Paul Grice’s early work on the foundations of linguistic semantics and pragmatics. Since its introduction, it has seen many diverse applications, but it has never enjoyed a stable place in linguistic theory. This book seeks to change that. Grice’s original discussion is used as a key into two presently understudied areas of natural language: supplements (appositives, parentheticals, utterance modifiers) and expressives (epithets, honorifics). The account of both depends on a multidimensional theory in which individual sentences can express more than one independent…