Computing Implicatures: An NRP-based Approach

Abstract

Song, Jae-gyun. 2006. Computing Implicatures: An NRP-based Approach. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 14(2), 217-240. In Song (2005), I claimed that Sauerland's (2004, 2005) and Gazdar's (1979) theory of clausal implicatures were conceptually and empirically inadequate, and then proposed an alternative analysis of clausal implicatures, which is based on the No Redundancy Principle (NRP), instead of the widely accepted Grician first submaxim of Quantity (Quantity-1). The NPR says, "Every meaningful expression, which is overtly said or written in a sentence or a text, must not be redundant: Either it must make a contribution to the truth-conditional interpretation, or its occurrence must be pragmatically licensed." The immediate aim of this paper is two-fold: To show that the NRP can also be applied to the computation of scalar implicatures with minor revisions to Song's (2005) analysis of clausal implicatures, and that the NRP can offer plausible accounts to two specific cases, which the Quantity-1 may have difficulties in handling: the discrepancy between clausal and scalar implicatures in defeasibility and conditional perfection. By doing so, I ultimately explore the possibility that the NRP could replace the Quantity-1 in the computation of implicatures.