Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie

06.02. Lidija Tasić (Niš): A Formal-Semantic Account of (Particularized) Implicatures: Towards a Unified Account of Implicatures [zoom]

 Criticism of the Gricean conception of implicatures as non-truth-conditional contributions to the meaning of an utterance has inspired the development of grammatical theories for scalar (Chierchia 2004; Chierchia et al. 2012; Marty 2017), conventional (Potts 2005), and ignorance implicatures (Fox 2007; Meyer 2013). However, despite evidence that speakers commit themselves to the truth of particularized implicatures as well (Weiner 2006; Carston 2002), particularized implicatures remain the only type of implicature still analyzed purely in terms of pragmatic inference (Sperber & Wilson 1986; Van Rooij & Schulz 2007; Zeevat & Winterstein 2023). This talk proposes a formal-semantic account of particularized implicatures that is rooted in grammar. The core idea is that particularized implicatures typically emerge from assertions (what is said) as stereotypical answers to explicit or implicit questions in the specific context (what is meant). I argue that the meaning of particularized implicatures can be formally modeled through a speaker-oriented contextual modal base (following Bianchi et al. 2016), a stereotypical ordering source function (following Yalcin 2014; Kratzer 2012), a Best function (as proposed by Jozina & Hohous 2020), and an implicit or explicit question under discussion (following Büring 2003). I also suggest that they are introduced in grammar by a covert assertion operator (Chierchia 2006). A preliminary model of their meaning will be proposed and illustrated with examples. Time permitting, the possibility of extending this model to other types of implicatures will also be discussed.