Dans ce thèse, nous présentons les implicatures conversationnelles de manière intuitive en nous appuyant sur le concept très large de granularité de Jerry Hobbs. Nous présentons ensuite les implicatures conversationnelles d'un point de vue interdisciplinaire en débutant par ses origines Gricéennes et en passant par la sociologie à travers la théorie de la politesse, l'inférence par l'abduction et les systèmes de dialogues par la théorie des actes de langage. Enfin, nous motivons les deux lignes d'approches de cette thèse pour l'étude des implicatures conversationnelles : l'analyse empirique d'un corpus de conversation située et finalisée, et l'analyse par synthèse dans le cadre d'un jeu d'aventure textuel. / In this thesis, we introduce conversational implicatures intuitively using Jerry Hobbs's broad concept of granularity. Then, we study conversational implicatures from an interdisciplinary perspective starting from its Gricean origins and moving into: sociology through politeness theory, inference through abduction and dialogue systems through speech act theory. Finally, we develop the two lines of attack used in this thesis to study conversational implicatures: empirical analysis of a corpus of situated task-oriented conversation, and analysis by synthesis in the setup of a text-adventure game.

No description available.

No description available.

The process of communication involves two types of meaning: explicit and implicit. An attempt is made to draw a distinction between two carriers of implicit meaning- presupposition and implicature. It is argued that presupposition is what the speaker assumes before making an utterance, and implicature is what the addressee infers from a linguistic structure used in an appropriate linguistic context. Implicature is of two types: non-contextual (or non-situational) and contextual (or situational). Although both types of implicature are determined by the context, they are generated using different types of context. Non-contextual implicature arises in contexts which are familiar to the addressee, while contextual implicature arises in contexts (situations) which are new to the addressee. Pragmatic competence is the ability to discover implicit meaning. Thus, of great importance is the description of the mechanism that carries implicit meaning. There are two such mechanisms: 1) linguistic structures used in appropriate linguistic contexts and 2) linguistic structures used in appropriate situations. The first mechanism is responsible for the generation of non-contextual implicature while the second mechanism is responsible for the generation of contextual implicature. Both types of implicature contribute to the economy of language. However, of the two types of implicature, the more important in the respect is contextual implicature- it makes possible to use one and the same... [to full text]

No description available.

Although conversations in television shows are supposed to mimic and represent everyday natural speech, they are written for a specific purpose. The aim of this paper is to find out what maxims are flouted the most in the television series Firefly and analyse what the effects of these flouts are. Presented here is an analysis of how scripted conversation in the aforementioned television show is constructed. By applying Grice's cooperative principle and his theories on flouting and implicatures, certain patterns emerge that show recurring uses of flouts for specific effects. The results are based on a study of three episodes of the television series Firefly. The results show that the maxim of quality is flouted the most and that the distribution of flouts between characters is somewhat uneven. This suggests that the use of flouts has to do with the personalities of the different characters.

<p>Two propositions connected by and have the same truth-value, irrespective of the order of the conjuncts. However, in a sentence like “I put my socks and shoes on” it becomes obvious that the order of the conjuncts affects the meaning of the sentence. This study concerns the contribution of pragmatics to and by implicit enrichment to and then or and thus. It includes three experiments that investigate and-enrichment in adults and children. Nine five-line stories concerning everyday events were used. After each story the participants were to respond “yes” or “no” to a statement which referred to two events that occurred in the story, conjoined with and. In the critical statement, the two events were presented in the inverse order to which they had occurred. The results show no general developmental effect but awareness of the task plays a critical role for and-enrichment production. Ten-year-olds enrich and to the same extent as adults when no efforts are made to mask the intention behind the task. However, when a more spontaneous response is captured by masking the purpose of the task children respond more logically. There are no clear evidence that and-enrichment is affected by the cognitive demands of the task.</p>

In learning language, children have to acquire not only words and constructions, but also the ability to make inferences about a speaker’s intended meaning. For instance, if in answer to the question, ‘what did you put in the bag?’, the speaker says, ‘I put in a book’, then the hearer infers that the speaker put in only a book, by assuming that the speaker is informative. On a Gricean approach to pragmatics, this implicated meaning – a quantity implicature – involves reasoning about the speaker’s epistemic state. This thesis examines children’s development of implicature understanding. It seeks to address the question of what the relationship is in development between quantity, relevance and manner implicatures; whether word learning by exclusion is a pragmatic forerunner to implicature, or based on a lexical heuristic; and whether reasoning about the speaker’s epistemic state is part of children’s pragmatic competence. This thesis contributes to research in experimental and developmental pragmatics by broadening the focus of investigation to include different types of implicatures, the relationship between them, and the contribution of other aspects of children’s development, including structural language knowledge. It makes the novel comparison of word learning by exclusion with a clearly pragmatic skill – implicatures – and opens an investigation of manner implicatures in development. It also presents new findings suggesting that children’s early competence with quantity implicatures in simple communicative situations belies their ongoing development in more complex ones, particularly where the speaker’s epistemic state is at stake. I present a series of experiments based on a sentence-to-picture-matching task, with children aged 3 to 7 years. In the first study, I identify a developmental trajectory whereby word learning by exclusion inferences emerge first, followed by ad hoc quantity and relevance, and finally scalar quantity inferences, which reflects their increasing complexity in a Gricean model. Then, I explore cognitive and environmental factors that might be associated with children’s pragmatic skills, and show that structural language knowledge – and, associated with it, socioeconomic status – is a main predictor of their implicature understanding. In the second study, I lay out some predictions for the development of manner implicatures, find similar patterns of understanding in children and adults, and highlight the particular challenges of studying manner implicatures experimentally. Finally, I focus on children’s ability to take into account the speaker’s epistemic state in pragmatic inferencing. While adults do not derive a quantity implicature appropriately when the speaker is ignorant, children tend to persist in deriving implicatures regardless of speaker ignorance, suggesting a continuing challenge of integrating contextual with linguistic information in utterance interpretation.

In this dissertation, I deal with the problem of presupposition projection. I mostly focus on compound sentences composed of two clauses and conditional sentences in which the second clause carries a presupposition. The central claim is that the presupposition carried by the second clause projects by default, with the exception of cases in which the presupposition entails the first clause (or, in disjunctive sentences, the negation of the first clause). In the latter cases, the presupposition should not project, since it is logically stronger than the first clause (or its negation). Thus, in conjunctions, if the presupposition projected, the speaker’s assertion of the first clause would be uninformative. As for conditionals and disjunctions, if the presupposition projected, the speaker would show inconsistency in his/her beliefs by showing uncertainty about the truth value of the first clause (or its negation). I argue that, in conditionals, this uncertainty is conversationally implicated whereas, in disjunctions, it results from the context’s compatibility with the first disjunct. I maintain that, in cases where projection is blocked, the presupposition is conditionalized to the first clause (or its negation). I demonstrate that the conditionalization is motivated in a straightforward way by the pragmatic constraints on projection just described and that, contrary to what is defended by the so-called ‘satisfaction theory’, presupposition conditionalization is a phenomenon independent from local satisfaction. / En esta tesis, trato el problema de la proyección de presuposiciones. Me centro mayoritariamente en oraciones compuestas de dos cláusulas y en oraciones condicionales cuya segunda cláusula contiene una presuposición. El argumento central es que la presuposición contenida en la segunda cláusula proyecta por defecto, con la excepción de casos en los que la presuposición entraña la primera cláusula (o, en las oraciones disyuntivas, la negación de la primera cláusula). En estos últimos casos, la presuposición no debería proyectar, puesto que es lógicamente más fuerte que la primera cláusula (o su negación). Por tanto, en las oraciones conjuntivas, si la presuposición proyectase, la aseveración de la primera cláusula por parte del hablante no sería informativa. En cuanto a las oraciones condicionales y disyuntivas, si la presuposición projectase, el hablante mostraría inconsistencia en sus creencias al mostrar incertidumbre acerca del valor de verdad de la primera cláusula (o su negación). Sostengo que, en oraciones condicionales, esta incertidumbre es implicada conversacionalmente mientras que, en las oraciones disyuntivas, resulta de la compatibilidad contextual de la primera cláusula. Mantengo que, en casos en los que la proyección es bloqueada, la presuposición es condicionalizada a la primera cláusula (o su negación). Demuestro que la condicionalización es motivada de manera directa por las restricciones de tipo pragmático descritas arriba y que, contrariamente a la idea defendida por la así llamada ‘teoría de la satisfacción’, la condicionalización de la presuposición es un fenómeno independiente de la satisfacción local de la misma.

The historical development of Morris’ tripartite distinction between syntax, semantics and pragmatics does not follow a smooth path. Examining definitions of the terms ‘semantic’ and ‘pragmatic’ and the phenomena they have been used to describe, provides insight into alternative approaches to the semantics/pragmatics distinction. Paul Grice’s work receives particular attention and taxonomy of philosophical positions, roughly divisible into content minimalist and maximalist groups, is set up. Grice’s often neglected theory of conventional implicature is defended from objections, various tests for the presence of conventional implicature are assessed and the linguistic properties of conventional implicature defined. Once rehabilitated, the theoretical utility of conventional implicature is demonstrated via a case study of the semantic import of the gender and number of pronouns in English. The better-known theory of conversational implicature is also examined and refined. New linguistic tests for such implicatures are devised and the refined theory is applied to scalar terms. A pragmatic approach to scalar implicatures is proposed and shown to fare better than alternatives presented by Uli Sauerland, Stephen Levinson and Gennaro Chierchia. With the details of the theory conversational implicature established, the use made of Grice’s tool in the work of several philosophers is critically evaluated. Kent Bach’s minimalist approach to quantifier domain restriction is examined and criticised. Also, the linguistic evidence for semantic minimalism provided by Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore is found wanting. Finally, a content maximalist approach to quantifier domain restriction is proposed. The approach differs from other context maximalist theories, such as Jason Stanley’s, in relying on semantically unarticulated constituents. Stanley’s arguments against such theories are examined. Further applications of the approach are briefly surveyed.