Robert van Rooy and Katrin Schulz. “Exhaustive interpretation of complex sentences”. to appear in the Journal of Logic, Language and Information.
In terms of Groenendijk & Stokhof’s (1984) formalization of exhaustive interpretation, many conversational implicatures can be accounted for. In this paper we justify and generalize this approach. Our justification proceeds by relating their account via Halpern & Moses’ (1984) non-monotonic theory of ‘only knowing’ to the Gricean maxims of Quality and the first sub-maxim of Quantity. The approach of Groenendijk & Stokhof (1984) is generalized such that it can also account for implicatures that are triggered in subclauses not entailed by the whole complex sentence.
I just added this paper to my pragmatics syllabus.
Well, I do not know whether these might be of interest, but there is a work by Gianluigi Bellin and Corrado Biasi about the Logic of Pragmatics. I have not read it yet (there is a whole possible world to read in my list! Alas!) And there is also a small work about how dialogues/ conversations/ debates abide by paraconsistency. Please, tell me if I am out of orbit or if these two might be of interest in a course in Pragmatics.
By the way, you also like counterfactuals, so perhaps this other post may be interesting. Those are my humble comments.
September 8th, 2004, at 7:13 am #