Cancelling the Maxim of Quantity: Another challenge for a Gricean theory of Scalar Implicatures

By Danny Fox. 2014

97 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Grice (1975) pointed out that the ignorance inferences normally drawn when disjunctive sentences are uttered are cancelled when it is presupposed that speakers are not going to provide all of the relevant information that they have available (e.g., in the context of a treasure hunt). This argues that ignorance inferences depend on the maxim of quantity for their derivation. Here it is argued that the situation with Scalar Implicatures is different. This is expected by the grammatical theory of Scalar Implicatures, but not by standard Gricean or neo-Gricean alternatives. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.7.5 BibTeX info

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Language and Linguistics, Philosophy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6e2e47a76f067ae86e5818d57d3cadb5c1caab99

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Citations in the corpus

Pragmatic reasoning through semantic inference (2016, background): “Accounting for why the specificity implicature is lacking and how the ignorance implicature comes about has become a problem of considerable prominence in recent semantic and pragmatic theory (Fox 2007, Russell 2012, Meyer 2013, Fox 2014).”
Children interpret disjunction as conjunction: Consequences for theories of implicature and child development (2016, unknown): “…under this approach, the Maxim of Quantity (MQ) is active but – because it is sensitive to everything that’s relevant, rather than a merely formally restricted subset of what’s relevant as under the neo-Gricean variant – MQ only generates ignorance implicatures (see especially Fox 2007, 2014).”