ANAND, Pranav & NEVINS, Andrew: 2004. “Shifty Operators in Changing
Contexts.” URL http://web.mit.edu/anevins/www/shiftyoperators.
pdf. SALT 14 Talk.

It’s great to get a sneak peek at your plans for the fall.

I taught pragmatics for two-weeks in St. Petersburg, Russia, this July. Many of the students were linguists, but from different traditions than mine. Almost none of them had heard of conversational implicatures before the course began. Nonetheless, on days 5 and 6 (of 6), we were able to fruitfully discuss intrusive conversational implicatures of the sort that Levinson highlights throughout his book Presumptive Meanings. I mainly called on material from chapter 1, sections 4 and 5, and chapter 3. I gave copies of these sections to especially interested students; it’s a reasonable amount of reading. The book is available from MIT CogNet (subscriber only).

Levinson’s stuff could form a useful introduction to the subsection called ‘Embedded implicatures’ on your course syllabus. Levinson makes initial connections with non-monotonic logic and layered DRT (without using that phrase, which I think was invented later on).

This stuff is a great way to round out a discussion of how best to balance semantic and pragmatic explanations. One can strike a perfect balance with, say, cardinal determiners, and then thow everything off balance with Levinson!

—Chris