Chris Potts on Conventional Implicature

“Christopher Potts”:http://ling.ucsc.edu/~potts/. “Conventional implicatures, a distinguished class of meanings”:http://ling.ucsc.edu/~potts/potts-cis-interfaces.pdf. To appear in Gillian Ramchand and Charles Reiss, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

bq. Abstract I return to Grice’s original definition of conventional implicature and argue that it picks out a theoretically important and widely attested class of meanings. I focus on nominal appositives like Lance, a cyclist, arguing that the propositions they express are best classified as conventional implicatures. I imbue this classification with theoretical content by developing a multidimensional meaning language that is suited to describing constructions with the properties specified in Grice’s definition. I illustrate with an analysis of nominal appositives that locates their special semantic properties in their characteristic comma intonation.