On September 10th, Marie-Christine Meyer from project SSI at ZAS Berlin will give a talk at the MIT Workshop on Exhaustivity 2016. The title of the talk is “Grice and Grammar: How cooperative are weak sentences?”
Abstract
In this talk we are going to explore the relation between grammatical ignorance implicatures and Gricean pragmatics. We argue that the maxims of Brevity and/or Quantity+Relation force us to assume that language, i.e, grammar, can encode not only lower-bounded meanings like “at least some”, but also upper-bounded meanings like “some but not all”. Crucially, grammar must even be able to encode the speaker’s ignorance about the upper bound if Grice’s maxims are valid at all. We arrive at the conclusion that syntactic operators like exh and K (be certain) make language highly suitable for cooperative communication in Grice’s sense — more suitable than a language without these operators.