Assertion, Implicature, and Speaker Meaning
Abstract
Students of conversational implicature generally agree that when a cooperative speaker makes an assertion that, given the conversation in which she is participating, is less informative than it might have been expected to be, she also conversationally implicates that she is not able to be any more informative than she has been. Such cases, often termed either ‘quantity implicatures’ or ‘scalar implicatures’, are an established part of research in pragmatics. It is argued here that for typical cases of this kind, interlocutors do not speaker-mean anything beyond what they say. Instead, parsimony enjoins us to see such cases as rudimentary forms of meaning better described in the framework of biological communication theory: they are generally either manifestations, cues, or signals in senses of those terms developed and motivated within that framework; in some cases they are also expressive utterances. Acknowledging this point enables us to see that while some aspects of human communication require cognitive sophistication, other aspects run on comparatively simpler machinery. Such features also provide clues to the cultural-evolutionary processes leading to our current practices of assertion and other members of the “assertive family” sensu (Green 2016a).References
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