Two Papers by Mandy Simons

Mandy Simons has two new papers on her website:

  • Presupposition and Cooperation (Under Review)

    “In this paper, I propose a novel view of presuppositions as those propositions which an interpreter must take the speaker to accept in order to take the speaker to be fully cooperative, in the Gricean sense.”

  • A Gricean View on Intrusive Implicatures. To appear in Klaus Petrus (ed.), Meaning and Analysis: New Essays on H. Paul Grice.

    “This paper explores one of the long-standing objections to Grice’s account of conversational implicature: the case of purported implicatures which are apparently generated by subordinate clauses, or which fall under the scope of a logical operator (typically both). Such cases, for reasons to be detailed below, pose a challenge to Grice’s account. While those who have posed the challenge, ranging from advocates of truth conditional pragmatics to strict compositionalists, have a wide variety of views as to the correct account of the data, they are united in reaching the same negative conclusion: that Grice’s account cannot be extended to intrusive implicatures.

    In this paper, I will argue for a different conclusion. I will suggest that there is a natural modification of Grice’s model which allows for the generation of implicatures from non-asserted sentence-parts. The goal of the paper is to articulate this modification and apply it to some sample cases. This is done in part 2 of the paper. In part 1, I introduce the cases to be investigated and explain in a little more detail what issues they raise.”