semantics etc.

Kai von Fintel's website

Chris Potts' Dissertation on Conventional Implicature

Christopher Potts is filing his dissertation tomorrow (congratulations!). It is available from his homepage.

Potts, Christopher. 2003. The Logic of Conventional Implicatures. PhD Dissertation. Department of Linguistics, UC Santa Cruz.

Abstract The history of conventional implicatures is rocky, their current status uncertain. I return to Grice’s (1975) original definition with an eye open for novel support. I argue that, even without textbook examples such as therefore and but, conventional implicatures would still be widely attested in natural language. Grice’s definition characterizes a class of speaker-oriented commitments that trace back to individual lexical items and invariably yield semantic multidimensionality. These properties unify the (syntactically diverse) factual domain, which divides fairly easily into two broad classes: (i) supplements, including appositive relatives, nominal appositives, (As)parentheticals, speaker and topic-oriented adverbs, and utterance modifiers (chapter 3); and (ii) expressives, including adjectives like damn, the descriptive content of epithets, some kinds of subjunctive voice, and honorification in Japanese (chapter 4). I define a higher-order lambda calculus that provides the tools we need for formalizing Grice’s definition and in turn for modelling the meanings of the expressions in (i)-(ii). The logic, which extends and sharpens the insights of Karttunen and Peters 1979, imbues the label conventional implicature with theoretical content. Though considerable attention is paid to the model-theoretic aspects of the investigation, particularly as they relate to the formal modelling of discourses, much of the dissertation concerns the nature of natural language semantic composition, which we can study independently of a specific class of structures. In the setting of the logic I define, conventional-implicature content is often distinguished solely in the meaning language. Thus, the facts under discussion seem to provide reason to view a representational language for meanings as an essential part of semantic theory. I close by asking what happens when we make slight revisions to Grice’s definition. Removing speaker-orientation results in another rich class of semantically multidimensional constructions, including many that were originally classified as conventional-implicature contributors. I show that the meaning language defined here yields a theory of them as well.

As a bonus, he also posts a long abstract (short, preliminary paper) called ‘A layered semantics for utterance modifiers’ (PDF), to be presented at the Workshop on Direct Compositionality, Brown University, June 19–21, 2003.

In this paper, I use utterance modifiers like frankly and honestly as an excuse to define a layered description logic and a layered class of structures for it. Together, these elements help to bring many formerly metagrammatical (pragmatic) phenomena into the grammar. I hope to develop these basic ideas into a theory of quotation, metalinguistic negation, and perhaps also what James Isaacs and I call hidden imperatives. I also feel near a semantics for textual organizers like firstly and on the other hand, which Geoff Pullum and I plan to discuss in our upcoming talk at FGVienna (the 8th Conference on Formal Grammar).