Conversational implicatures

  • Authors:
  • Robert van Rooy

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Amsterdam, CP Amsterdam

  • Venue:
  • SIGDIAL '01 Proceedings of the Second SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue - Volume 16
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

According to standard pragmatics, we should account for conversational implicatures in terms of Grice's (1975) maxims of conversation. Neo-Griceans like Atlas & Levinson (1981) and Horn (1984) seek to reduce those maxims to the so-called Q and I-principles. In this paper I want to argue that (i) there are major problems for reducing Gricean pragmatics to these two principles, and (ii) that, in fact, we'd better account for implicatures in terms of the principles of (a) optimal relevance and (b) optimal coding. To formulate both, I will make use of Shannon's (1948) mathematical theory of communication.