The Myth of Conventional Implicature*
Kent
Bach
Grice’s distinction between what
is said and what is implicated has greatly clarified our understanding of the
boundary between semantics and pragmatics. Although border disputes still arise
and there are certain difficulties with the distinction itself (see the end of
§1), it is generally understood that what is said falls on the semantic side
and what is implicated on the pragmatic side. But this applies only to what is conversationally
implicated. Grice’s category of conventional implicature throws a monkey
wrench into his distinction, inasmuch as conventional implicatures derive from
the meanings of particular expressions rather than from conversational
circumstances. This monkey wrench needs to be removed. I will argue that there
is no such thing as conventional implicature and that the phenomena that have
been described as such are really instances of something else.
In
linguistics and philosophy it is common to suppose that certain words, such as
‘but’, ‘still’, and ‘even’, do something besides contribute to what is said in
utterances of sentences containing them. So, for example, the difference
between (1) and (2) supposedly consists not in what they say but merely in what
is indicated by (the presence of) the word ‘but’:
(1) Shaq is huge but he is agile.
(2) Shaq is huge and he is agile.
According to common wisdom, the
truth of (1) requires nothing more than the truth of (2), although in uttering
(1) rather than (2) one is indicating that there is some sort of contrast
between being huge and being agile. But one is not saying that. Nor is
it even entailed by what is one saying. On the other hand, this
proposition is not a conversational implicature, because its being
indicated depends essentially on the conventional meaning of the word ‘but’.
The common view is that it is a conventional implicature (§1).
My
aim is to debunk this view and its intuitive basis. There are two sorts of
locution that have been thought to generate conventional implicatures. I will
argue that expressions of the first kind, typified by ‘but’, ‘still’, and
‘even’, in fact contribute to what is said. The best evidence that they do is
that they can occur straightforwardly in indirect quotation (§2). They seem not
to contribute to what is said, I will suggest (§3), because intuitions about
the truth or falsity of utterances containing them are insensitive to their
contribution, which, though truth-conditional, is secondary to the main point
of the utterance. Indeed, contrary to the common assumption of one sentence,
one proposition, such utterances express more than one proposition (§4).
There
are locutions of another kind which, although they do not contribute to what is
said, do not generate conventional implicatures either. They do something else.
They are vehicles for the performance of second-order speech acts.[
] A locution like ‘confidentially’, ‘in other words’, or ‘to get back
to the point’ can be used to comment on some aspect of the speech act being
performed in the utterance of the matrix sentence.[1] I call these locutions utterance
modifiers, as opposed to sentence modifiers, because they do not modify the
content of the sentence but instead characterize the act of uttering it.[2] In other words, although they
are syntactically coordinate with the rest of the sentence, they are not
semantically coordinate with it. Utterance modifiers will be taxonomized in §5
and alternative accounts of them will be discussed in §6. For purposes of
illustration (as well as exposition) they will be used liberally throughout
this paper.
Grice
himself warned that “the nature of conventional implicature needs to be
examined before any free use of it, for explanatory purposes, can be indulged
in” (1989, p. 46). In heeding his warning I aim to show that conventional
implicature is, in the words Boër and Lycan used to denounce semantic
presupposition, “a theoretical artifact of linguistic and philosophical
semanticists” (1976, p. 81).[3] Both are a myth.
1. The Intuitive case for Conventional Implicature
If there are conventional
implicatures, they must be conventional and they must be implicatures. An
implicature is different from an entailment or a semantic presupposition, in
that it is not necessary for the truth of the sentence. And for an implicature
to qualify as conventional, it must depend on the conventional meaning of a
particular locution in the sentence. A conventional implicature is, as Grice
says, not “calculable.” In this way it is different from a conversational
implicature, which depends on the fact that what is said is, in the context,
not sufficiently plausible, informative, relevant, or otherwise appropriate and
whose conveyance requires an inference based on the supposition that the
speaker wouldn’t have said what he said if he hadn’t meant something more than
that. The conventional implicature (CI-) thesis is that there are certain
locutions which do not contribute to what is said and do not affect the truth
or falsity of what is said and yet, by virtue of their conventional meanings,
generate implicatures.[4]
What
reasons have been given for thinking there is such a thing as conventional
implicature? I know of only one, rather weak argument for it (to be discussed
below). The case for the CI-thesis seems to rest almost entirely on intuition.
All those who share this intuition and see no need to back it up at least enjoy
the good company of Frege and Grice.
Grice
is usually credited with the discovery of conventional implicature, but it was
actually Frege’s idea—Grice merely labeled it. In “On Sense and Reference”,
Frege wrote,
Subsidiary
clauses beginning with ‘although’ … express complete thoughts. This conjunction
actually has no sense and does not change the sense of the clause but only
illuminates it in a peculiar fashion. [footnote: Similarly in the case of ‘but’
and ‘yet’.] We could indeed replace the concessive clause without harm to the
truth of the whole by another of the same truth value; but the light in which
the clause is placed by the conjunction might then easily appear unsuitable, as
if a song with a sad subject were to be sung in a lively fashion. (Frege
1892/1994, p. 155)
Much later, in “The Thought”,
Frege puts his idea this way:
With
the sentence ‘Alfred has still not come’ one really says ‘Alfred has not
come’ and, at the same time, hints that his arrival is expected, but it
is only hinted. It cannot be said that, since Alfred’s arrival is not expected,
the sense of the sentence is therefore false. … The word ‘but’ differs from
‘and’ in that with it one intimates that what follows is in contrast
with what would be expected from what preceded it. Such suggestions in speech make
no difference to the thought. (Frege 1918/1994, p. 522; my italics)
In other words, ‘still’ and ‘but’
(beyond its conjunctive import) have no bearing on the truth or falsity of what
is said.
Grice
makes a similar point about ‘therefore’:
If
I say (smugly), He is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave, I have
certainly committed myself, by virtue of the meaning of my words, to its being
the case that his being brave is a consequence of (follows from) his being an
Englishman. But while I have said that he is an Englishman, and said that he is
brave, I do not want to say that I have said (in the favored sense) that it
follows from his being an Englishman that he is brave, though I have certainly
indicated, and so implicated, that this is so. I do not want to say that my
utterance of this sentence would be, strictly speaking, false should the
consequence in question fail to hold. (Grice 1989, p. 25)
‘Therefore’ is not the most
convincing example, for it seems that the truth of the utterance does
require that the second proposition be a consequence of the first. More
plausible is Grice’s earlier example involving ‘but’,
(3) She is poor but she is honest.
where the putative contrast
between being poor and being honest is, he claims, “implied as distinct from
being stated” (Grice 1961, p. 127).[5]
Frege
and Grice, beyond appealing to intuition, do not try to justify what they say
about ‘but’, ‘still’, and ‘therefore’. Grice does remark that conventional
implicatures are detachable but not cancelable, but this cannot serve as a test
for their presence. It does distinguish them from conversational implicatures,
which are cancelable but not detachable (except for those induced by exploiting
the maxim of manner, which depend on how one puts what one says), and from
entailments, which are neither cancelable nor detachable. However,
detachability is not an independent test. If a supposed implicature really were
part of what is said, one could not leave it out and still say the same thing.
To use ‘and’ rather than ‘but’, for example, would be to say less.
Before
attempting to evaluate the CI-thesis, we need to get clear on what it says and
what it doesn’t say. This is important, inasmuch there are several
misunderstandings about conventional implicature that have crept into the
literature and need to be dispelled. The CI-thesis says that there are certain
locutions which give rise to implicatures by virtue of their meanings. The
propositions are said to be implicatures because their truth value does not
affect the truth value of the entire utterance, so that the falsity of such a
proposition is compatible with the truth of the entire utterance. So, according
to the CI-thesis, the truth of (1) would not be affected if there were no
contrast, real or presumed, between being huge and being agile. Accordingly, we
may define conventional implicature as follows:
(CI) A proposition is a conventional implicature of an
utterance just in case (a) the speaker (speaking seriously) is committed to the
truth of the proposition, (b) which proposition that is depends upon the (or a)
conventional meaning of some particular linguistic device in the utterance, but
(c) the falsity of that proposition is compatible with the truth of the
utterance.
As is clear from the passages
quoted above, this is essentially what Frege and Grice had in mind. However, in
the literature the conception encapsulated by (CI) seems to have been confused
with several other ideas, none of which is essential to conventional
implicature.
One
of Frege’s own remarks might confuse the issue. He characterizes the import of
‘but’ and ‘still’ as merely “hinted” or “intimated”, but this could be taken to
mean that the relevant dimension is degree of speaker commitment. That can’t be
right (or what Frege meant), for the speaker could be as much committed to what
he is implicating as to what he is saying. Or it might seem that Frege is
saying that the import of words like ‘but’ and ‘still’ is not fully explicit.
There is a trivial sense in which (alleged) conventional implicatures are not
explicit, as in Frege’s example, ‘Alfred has still not come’, where the import of ‘still’ is a
complete proposition that is obviously not spelled out. Presumably the claim
that such words generate conventional implicatures comes to more than this
triviality. ‘OK’ or ‘No’, uttered by themselves, do not make explicit the
propositions they express (in context), but this does not mean that they merely
give rise to conventional implicatures.
A
third misleading, though common, way of describing what is involved in
conventional implicature is to say that the relevant terms have
“non-truth-conditional” meaning.[6] This misleadingly suggests that
the conventional implicatures they generate are neither true nor false. But of
course implicatures are true or false, and presumably different words generate
ones with different truth conditions, as with the minimal pair in (4), for
example:
(4) a. John
is a philosopher but he is rich.
b. John is a philosopher so he is rich.
Obviously, the conditions under
which the contrast indicated by ‘but’ obtains are different from those under
which the consequence indicated by ‘so’ obtains. So the presence of ‘but’ or
‘so’ affects the truth conditions of something. The question is whether they
affect the truth-conditions of what is said. Accordingly, the CI-thesis should
not be read to mean that such terms have non-truth-conditional meaning.[7]
As
explained by (CI), a conventional implicature is a proposition which is
conveyed due to the presence of a certain term with a certain meaning but whose
falsity is compatible with the truth of the utterance. This was Grice’s
conception and the one that gained currency among linguists, thanks to
Karttunen and Peters (1979), who proposed it as a replacement for the notion of
semantic presupposition, which by the late seventies had been discredited (see
note 4). In their view,
a
large set of cases that have been called presupposition are really instances of
conventional implicature. The most obvious examples are those associated with
particles like too, either, also, even, only, and so on. This class also
includes the presuppositions of certain factive verbs, such as forget, realize,
take into account, and so on, and those that accompany implicative verbs
like manage and fail. … These are just a few examples; the list
could be made much longer.[8] (1979, p. 11)
Their examples illustrate the
sorts of terms that have been thought to generate conventional implicatures. I
will call these terms ACIDs (alleged conventional implicature devices). Here is
a representative list of those that I have seen:[9]
ACIDS
adverbs:
already, also, barely, either, only, scarcely, still, too, yet
connectives:
but, nevertheless, so, therefore, yet
implicative
verbs: bother, condescend, continue, deign, fail, manage, stop
subordinating
conjunctions: although, despite (the fact that), even though
Karttunen
and Peters offer only one argument for the CI-thesis. Applied to the occurrence
of ‘even’ in (5),
(5)
Even Bill likes Mary.
it is meant to show that “the
truth of what [5] says depends solely on whether Bill likes Mary” (1979, p.
12). Suppose (5) is embedded in (6):
(6)
John just noticed that even
Bill likes Mary.
The crux of the argument is that
(6) “does not mean that he has just noticed that other people like Mary or just
noticed that Bill is the least likely person to do so” (1979, p. 13). But does
it follow that either of these propositions is conventionally implicated?
Karttunen and Peters assume that noticing a complex fact requires noticing its
constituent facts. Their reasoning is that since (6) does not entail that John
just noticed that other people like Mary or that Bill is the least likely
person to do so, (6) says merely that John just noticed that Bill likes Mary,
i.e., that ‘even’ does not contribute to what John is being said to have
noticed. However, this line of argument is invalid, as (7) illustrates:
(7)
John just noticed that Bill has
three cars.
(7) could be true even if John
has long known of two of Bill’s cars and just became aware of a third one.
The
same point applies to implicative verbs, such as ‘manage’. While functioning
syntactically as a main verb, ‘manage (to)’ seems to modify the verb in its
infinitival complement, entailing that the action in question requires effort
or involves difficulty. However, this proposition is not a mere conventional
implicature, for it is part of the content of sentences in which ‘manage’
occurs. The content of (8), for example,
(8)
Bill managed to finish
his homework.
includes both the finishing and
the entailed difficulty. The same point made above about noticing applies here:
one could notice that Bill managed to finish his homework even if one already
knew that finishing it would be difficult.
Despite
the lack of compelling argument for the CI-thesis, the notion of conventional
implicature continues to be used uncritically. For instance, in a recent paper
in which he endorses a conventional implicature approach to ‘even’,
Francescotti (1995) forcefully argues against various truth-conditional
accounts and, with some ingenious examples, shows that the import of ‘even’ is
contextually variable. However, this hardly supports his claim that it
generates conventional implicatures. Francescotti does not argue but
evidently just assumes that because the truth-conditional approach cannot
accommodate contextual variability, only the conventional implicature approach
can. Even more recently Rieber, who proposes an ingenious new theory of
conventional implicature, does not find it necessary to show that there is such
a thing (1997, p. 51n). He just gives a few stock examples of ACIDs, asserts
that they “exhibit the peculiar feature of having a non-truth-conditional
meaning” (1997, p. 51), and launches into his new theory (it will be discussed
in §6).
Look where you may,
the case for conventional implicature seems to rest almost entirely on
intuitions about cases. One is just supposed to see that (9), (10),
(11), for example,
(9)
Arthur was a lawyer but
he was honest.
(10)
Even though Arthur was a
lawyer, he was honest.
(11)
Arthur was a lawyer; nevertheless
he was honest.
say nothing more than
(12)
Arthur was a lawyer and he
was honest.
Any suggestion that being a
lawyer does not lend itself to being honest is, according to this intuition,
merely a matter of implicature. The intuition is that even though a serious,
literal user of (9), (10), or (11) commits himself to more than he would if he
merely uttered (12), he is saying no more—if (12) is true, so are these other
utterances. No support for this intuition is provided by the claim that
conventional implicatures are detachable—that is just part of the intuition.
For, as observed earlier, it just begs the question to use detachability as a
test for the presence of a conventional implicature—if something really is part
of what is said, you can’t say the same thing if you leave it out.
In
the next three sections, I will attempt to undermine the intuitive support for
the CI-thesis. In §2 I will show that ACIDs pass a test that they would fail if
they generated conventional implicatures instead of contributing to what is
said. In §3 I will identify several factors that conspire to produce the
spurious intuitions that make it seem that certain terms generate conventional
implicatures. And in §4 I will propose a new way of looking at the semantic
content of sentences containing ACIDs. From this perspective it becomes clear
how CI-intuitions can arise and why they are spurious.
Before
proceeding, we should take account of certain issues raised by the notion of
what is said, the other side of the contrast with what is implicated. This
notion enters into a number of distinctions. In addition to being contrasted
with what is conventionally implicated, what is said has been contrasted with
what is conversationally implicated, with what is semantically presupposed,
with what is meant, and with what is asserted. Each of these contrasts has its
own theoretical significance, and this is not the place to compare and contrast
them all (see Neale 1992). However, there is the underlying question of how
strictly the notion of what is said should be construed. Presumably what is
said corresponds to the constituents of the utterance (and to how they are
combined syntactically). However, this does not mean that what is said must be
made fully explicit. In the case of ellipsis, for example, what is not spelled
out explicitly is still part of what is said. With (13), involving VP-ellipsis,
(13) Frege was a great philosopher of
language, and so was Grice.
the speaker is saying, not merely
implicating, that Grice was a great philosopher of language. On the other hand,
what about the case of phrasal utterances? Suppose that (14), for example,
(14) Château Margaux
is given in answer to the
question “what is your favorite wine?” Is the speaker saying that his
favorite wine is Château Margaux? Well, he might have uttered ‘Château Margaux’
in answer to the question, “what is the most expensive wine you own?”, to “what
is the most famous château of the southern Médoc?”, or to “what was Margaux
Hemingway named after?” Even so, surely he has not merely implicated,
conventionally or otherwise, that his favorite wine is Château Margaux. But if
we grant that he has said this, we must allow that he has not said this fully
explicitly.[10] There is a relevant difference
between (14) and (13) however, because in (13) what is not spelled out is
nevertheless recoverable without consideration of the extralinguistic or prior
linguistic context.[11] In contrast, phrasal utterances
like (14) do not, strictly speaking, say what they are used to convey in
context. This would be Grice’s view, for on his strict conception, what is said
must correspond to “the elements of [the sentence], their order, and their
syntactic character” (1989, p. 87).[12] At any rate, for present
purposes we should focus on utterances of complete sentences. For with an
utterance of a complete sentence, there will be no element in what is said that
does not correspond to some constituent of the sentence.[13] This leaves open the question of
whether there can be constituents that do not correspond to anything in what is
said but instead give rise to conventional implicatures.
Although
Grice thinks that his conception comports with “intuitive understanding of the
meaning of say” (1989, pp. 24-25), it does depart somewhat from common
usage (see Bach 1994, pp. 141-144). In particular, he stipulates that what is
said falls under the category of what is meant.[14] On his stipulation, if one is
not speaking literally and seriously, one is not saying anything but, as Grice
puts it, merely “making as if to say” something. Not only is this unduly
restrictive, in effect it conflates the locutionary and illocutionary levels of
speech-act analysis. Indeed, Grice (and many others) tend to equate saying with
stating. On the other hand, it seems reasonable for Grice to allow, while
requiring that what is said correspond to the constituents and structure of the
sentence, that disambiguation and reference fixation also contribute to the
determination of what is said.
Whether
Grice’s conception of what is said is too restrictive or too relaxed, Sperber
and Wilson (1986) and Recanati (1988) have gone so far as to deny that there is
a level of what is said that even satisfies Grice’s criterion. They argue that
what is said includes certain pragmatically determined elements beyond the
uncontroversial ones that Grice allowed (fixing reference and resolving
ambiguity), hence that what is said is not entirely explicit.[15] They argue further that in many
cases no proposition is assigned to the sentence prior to the application of
these processes. Their position is analogous to the view that understanding an
utterance containing a metaphor does not require first giving it a literal
reading, then judging that reading to be false, and only then, by applying
Grice’s first maxim of quality (truthfulness), inferring the metaphorical
import of the utterance. This is not the place to go into details (see Bach
1994, pp. 154-160), but suffice it to say that their view concerns the
processing of semantic information, not the nature of it. Their argument
assumes that any sentence whose utterance can be interpreted without
computation of a literally expressed proposition does not express a proposition
literally. This argument overlooks the important distinction between
information available to the hearer and the specific pattern of inference
followed by the hearer that exploits this information (Bach and Harnish 1979,
pp. 89-91). The concept of what is said does not concern the nature of hearer’s
inference to the intended content of the utterance but merely the semantically
determined portion of the information available to that inference.
Finally,
it is important to recognize that the distinction between what is said and what
is implicated is not exhaustive. Intermediate between the explicit and the
implied is the implicit, or what I call conversational impliciture (Bach
1994; see the examples in note 14). Even if the category of conversational
implic-a-ture needs to be complemented by conversational implic-i-ture, it is
still a relatively uncontroversial category. Much more problematic is the
category of conventional implicature. As we will see, to the extent that
putative conventional implicatures really are implicatures, they are not
conventional, and to the extent that they are conventional they are not
implicatures.
2. The IQ Test
There is a very simple problem
with the CI-thesis. It claims that using certain expressions (ACIDs), as a
matter of their meaning, commits a speaker (using them seriously and literally)
to a proposition that is not part of what he is saying. Its main support is the
intuition that the falsity of this proposition is compatible with the truth of
what is said, hence that this proposition is not part of what is said. However,
proponents of the CI-thesis seem to have overlooked the fact that ACIDs can
occur perfectly well in indirect quotations of utterances containing them. The
reason this fact poses a problem for the CI-thesis is, quite simply, that the
‘that’-clause in an indirect quotation specifies what is said in the utterance
being reported, and ACIDs can occur in specifications of what is said. Here are
some examples:
(1) Shaq is huge but he is agile.
(1IQ) Marv
said that Shaq is huge but that he is agile.
(15) Shaq can dunk and block shots too.
(15IQ) Marv
said that Shaq can dunk and block shots too.
(16) Even Shaq can make some free
throws.
(16IQ) Marv
said that even Shaq can make some free throws.
(17) Shaq managed to make four out of
nine free throws.
(17IQ) Marv
said that Shaq managed to make four out of nine free throws.
So far as I know, advocates of
conventional implicature have not confronted, much less explained away, the
fact that such expressions as ‘but’, ‘too’, ‘even’, and ‘manage’ occur
straightforwardly in indirect quotation. It is true that an ACID can be used by
the reporter to make an editorial comment on what he is reporting as being
said, but an ACID can also contribute to what is being reported.[16] When that is the case, leaving
the term out would render the specification of what was said less than fully
accurate, as in the following indirect quotations:
(1-IQ) Marv
said that Shaq is huge and that he is agile.
(15-IQ) Marv said
that Shaq can dunk and block shots.
(16-IQ) Marv said
that Shaq can make some free throws.
(17-IQ) Marv said
that Shaq made four out of nine free throws.
The fact that these indirect
quotations are incomplete and to that extent inaccurate shows that the
propositions alleged to be merely conventionally implicated by (1), (15), (16),
and (17) are not detachable (as conventional implicatures are supposed to be)
but are in fact part of what is said.[17] The ACIDs in these examples, as
well as the others on the list of ACIDs given earlier, contribute to what is
said because they pass the IQ test:
(IQ test): An element of a sentence contributes to what
is said in an utterance of that sentence if and only if there can be an
accurate and complete indirect quotation of the utterance (in the same
language) which includes that element, or a corresponding element, in the
‘that’-clause that specifies what is said.
The IQ test is formulated in accordance
with Grice’s strict construction of ‘what is said’, so as to apply only to
indirect quotations that respect the constituent structure of the utterance
being reported (a looser standard would make passing the IQ test too easy and
bias it against the CI-thesis). Even so, the qualification ‘or a corresponding
element’ must be included in this formulation to allow for indirect quotations
that require adjustment for tenses or indexicals, e.g., ‘was’ for ‘is’, ‘then’
for ‘now’, and ‘he’ or ‘she’ for ‘I’. Similarly, the parenthetical ‘in the same
language’ is included because if an utterance is reported in a different
language, there may be no available oblique clause of the same syntactic form.
Also, it should be understood that the IQ test applies only to fully indirect
and not to “mixed” quotation, where part of the material in an otherwise
indirect quotation is intended to be taken as directly quoted.[18] The IQ test can only exclude
elements that do not contribute to what is said in the sense of propositional
content—any element, even an interjection, contributes to what is said in the
sense of what is uttered.
Not
all expressions commonly cited as sources of conventional implicatures pass the
IQ test. In fact, there are many locutions that flunk it: their occurrence in
an utterance defies inclusion in specifications of what is said. As the
following examples illustrate, some locutions do not fit comfortably into
indirect quotations of utterances containing them, at least not if used to
report part of what was said:
(18) Moreover, Bill is honest.
(18IQ) #John
said that moreover, Bill is honest.
(19) Now that you mention it, New
York is a great place to visit.
(19IQ) #John
said that now that he mentioned it, New York is a great place to visit.
(20) In other words, Bill is a liar.
(20IQ) #John
said that in other words, Bill is a liar.
These utterance modifiers, as
I call them, do not contribute to what is said, but that does not mean, as
Grice suggested, that they give rise to conventional implicatures. Rather, they
are vehicles for the performance of second-order speech acts, as Grice also
suggested.[19] For example, “the meaning of
‘moreover’ is linked to the speech-act of adding, the performance of which
would require the performance of one or another of the central speech-acts”
(Grice 1989, p. 125). In using it at the beginning of a sentence whose
utterance adds to what was previously said, one is not implicating but
explicitly indicating that one is adding something. In using ‘in other words’, one
is not implicating but explicitly indicating that the balance of the utterance
will reformulate something just said.
Utterance modifiers,
such as ‘moreover’, ‘now that you mention it’, and ‘in other words,’ are used
for the benefit of an
audience. As they
occur in sentences like (18) - (20), they do not contribute to the expression
of a thought but characterize the expression of it (if one thinks in words, one
does not think in those words). For this reason, not only do they flunk the IQ
test, they do not belong in propositional attitude ascriptions, such as the
following belief reports,
(18BR) #John
believes that moreover, Bill is honest.
(19BR) #John
believes that now that I mention it, New York is a great place to visit.
(20BR) #John
believes that in other words, Bill is a liar.
They cannot contribute to
ascribed belief contents.
Because
of the second-order function of an utterance modifier, its semantic content is
not coordinate with that of the rest of the sentence. Rather, it characterizes
what one is doing in the act of uttering the rest of the sentence (hence the
label ‘utterance modifier’). If it is a connective, it is a discourse as
opposed to a content connective. To appreciate the difference, compare
the uses of ‘although’ in the following two utterances:
(21) Although the judge issued a gag
order, my client will appear on Hard Copy.
(22) Although the judge issued a gag
order, my client has an airtight alibi.
In (21), the content of the main
clause contrasts with the content of the subordinate clause. The use of
‘although’ indicates that there is some sort of clash between the two. In (22),
on the other hand, there is no suggestion of any contrast between the client’s
having an alibi and the gag order. Rather, the speaker is using the ‘although’
clause to perform the second-order speech act of indicating that his
first-order speech act, of making a statement about the case, is a violation of
the gag order. The same contrast in uses is exhibited by ‘nevertheless’:
(23) The judge issued a gag order; nevertheless
my client will appear on Hard Copy.
(24) The judge issued a gag order; nevertheless
my client has an airtight alibi.[20]
Notice that the occurrences of
‘although’ in (21) and of ‘nevertheless’ in (23) pass the IQ test, but not those
in (22) and (24). Compare (21IQ) and (22IQ), for example:
(21IQ) The
lawyer said that although the judge issued a gag order, his client
would
appear on Hard Copy.
(22IQ) #The
lawyer said that although the judge issued a gag order, his client
had
an airtight alibi.
The trouble with (22IQ) is that the content of the
‘although’-clause is not part of what the lawyer said. When used as part of an
utterance modifier, ‘although’ (or ‘nevertheless’) flunks the IQ test.
Care
must be taken in applying the IQ test. For example, if we quoted just the
second half of (23), as in (23-IQ),
(23-IQ) The
lawyer said that nevertheless his client would appear on Hard Copy.
it would seem that ‘nevertheless’
as it occurs in (23) flunks the IQ test. However, a complete quotation of (23)
would show that it passes the test:
(23IQ) The
lawyer said that the judge had issued a gag order [but] nevertheless
his
client would appear on Hard Copy.
False negatives can result from
applying the IQ test to indirect quotations taken out of context.
To sum up, occurrences of
locutions that pass the IQ test contribute to what is said and locutions that
function as utterance modifiers flunk it. Utterance modifiers, which will be
catalogued in §5, do not contribute to what is said but indicate something
about the act of saying it. They do not encode an element of thought but are
essentially communicative devices. But most of the expressions which have been
put forward, from Frege and Grice on, as sources of conventional implicatures
pass the IQ test and do contribute to what is said.
3.
Undermining the CI-Intuition
The fact that ACIDs pass the IQ
test presents a major difficulty for the CI-thesis, but what about its
intuitive support? To undermine that I will begin by using ‘but’ as a case
study. Our observations about ‘but’ will then be extended to other ACIDs (but not
to utterance modifiers). There are several factors, in my view, which conspire
to make it seem that the contrastive import of ‘but’ does not contribute to
what is said and gives rise merely to a conventional implicature.[21]
The
first factor is that ‘but’ does not encode a unique contrastive relation. As a
result, its import can vary with the context. The most natural way of taking
‘but’ in (1), especially out of context,
(1) Shaq is huge but he is agile.
is as
indicating that being huge tends to preclude being agile, but that is not the
only contrastive relation between these properties. For an alternative, suppose
we’re talking about NBA centers, most of whom are both huge and agile. I make a
list of exceptions (centers I think are huge and clumsy), but mistakenly put
Shaquille O’Neal on the list. You point out my mistake and say, “Shaq is huge
but he is agile”. The contrast here between being huge and being agile is that
having the second property distinguishes Shaq from the others on the list. And
if I insist that Shaq is huge and clumsy and you again say, “Shaq is huge but
he is agile”, you are indicating a third sort of contrast between being huge
and being agile, namely that being agile, unlike being huge, is not a property
I ascribed to Shaq. So there is no unique sort of contrast that is determined
by the meaning of the word ‘but’. This shows that there is no unique
contribution that ‘but’ makes to truth-conditional content, so that any
specific claim about its truth-conditional content is vulnerable to
counterexample, but it does not suggest, much less show, that ‘but’ generates a
conventional implicature. This variability suggests that the different
contextual effects are conversational, not conventional (I would call them
implicitures rather than implicatures).
A
second factor contributing to the CI-intuition is that the contrast indicated
by ‘but’ is often common ground rather than part of what the speaker is
asserting. This does not mean that the relevant contrast is not part of what is
said, for not all aspects of what is said need be of equal prominence. Being
common ground, the contrast is pragmatically presupposed (see note 4), but this
suggests not that it is conventionally implicated but only that it is
informationally and conversationally subordinate to the main content of the
utterance. The point here is analogous to part of Boër and Lycan’s diagnosis of
the myth of semantic presupposition. They point out that, as with clefts and
nonrestrictive relative clauses, “information that is plainly part of the
semantic content of a sentence may have been placed … in so unemphatic a
position … that we are disinclined to admit that that information is part of
what that sentence says” (1976, p. 74).[22] The same point could be made
about the alleged conventional implicature induced by the standard contrastive
use of ‘but’.[23]
A
third factor, related to the second, is that the CI-intuition is produced as
the result of a forced choice. One is forced to judge an utterance containing
‘but’ as simply true or simply false. Matters may not be so simple, however, for there may be more choices. What would we say
about (25),
(25) Shaq is huge but he is rich.
given that there is no contrast
(not even a presumptive one) between being huge and being rich? Advocates of
the CI-thesis would acknowledge that there is something wrong with (25), even
though Shaq is both huge and rich, but the lack of a relevant contrast does not
incline them to regard (25) as false. That is, given the choice between judging
(25) true and judging it false, they judge it true. They see it has having the
same truth condition as (26),
(26) Shaq is huge and he is rich.
so that the contrast indicated by
‘but’ does not affect truth value and thus does not enter into what is said.
But what if we do not have to choose between saying that (25) is categorically
true or categorically false?
No
such choice is required in the case of sentences containing nonrestrictive
relative clauses or appositives, as in
(27) Ann’s computer, which she bought in
1992, crashes frequently.
(28) Beth’s husband, a plumber, never
washes the dishes.
If Ann bought her computer in
1993 and Beth’s husband is an electrician, are (27) and (28) false? No doubt
many people, if forced to make a choice, would say the sentences are true
anyway. But would they want to say that what is expressed by the material
between the commas is not part of what is said? Surely not. It is either true or
false that Ann bought her computer in 1992 and that Beth’s husband is a
plumber. Are these propositions part of what is said? Well, whatever they are,
clearly they are not merely implicated.
I
take it as uncontroversial that nonrestrictive relative clauses and appositives
(and parentheticals) can be assessed as true or false. The relevant point is
that intuitions about the truth or falsity of utterances containing them tend
to ignore them. Why should this be? They seem to get ignored because they are
not prominent enough to count (see Boër and Lycan’s observation quoted above).
With (27) and (28), the proposition expressed by the main clause is the one
whose truth value is intuitively judged to bear on that of the whole utterance.[24] For the same reason, in judging
the truth or falsity of utterances containing ‘but’, we tend to ignore its
contrastive force. To appreciate how this can happen, consider the effect of
replacing ‘but’ with phrases that spell out the different contrastive forces
(mentioned above) that might be intended in an utterance of (1) :
(1) a. Shaq
is huge and, unlike most huge people, he is agile.
(1) b. Shaq
is huge and, unlike others on the list, he is agile.
(1) c. Shaq
is huge and, contrary to what you said, he is agile.
Taken in context, the italicized
phrases clearly can be assessed as true or false (to the extent that anything
less than a complete clause can be true or false). Even so, the falsity of the
proposition associated with the phrase does not seem sufficient for the falsity
of the entire utterance. This is so even though (1a), (1b), and (1c) do not
merely implicate the relevant contrast but actually say what the contrast is.
So the mere fact, if it is a fact, that the falsity of a proposition expressed
by part of a sentence does not affect the truth of the whole does not show that
this proposition is a conventional implicature.
The
same is true of (1) itself, where the relevant contrast is not made explicit.
In general, intuitions about the truth or falsity of utterances containing
ACIDs tend to ignore the secondary proposition being expressed. This is clearly
what happens with utterances containing nonrestrictive relative clauses or
appositives (or parethenticals), where the truth value of the material set off
between the commas (or parentheses) tends to be downplayed. In the next section
I will suggest that this is possible because such utterances do not express one
composite proposition but two separate and separately evaluable ones, one of
which is peripheral to the main point of the utterance. When the secondary
proposition is false but the primary one is true, intuitions about the truth or
falsity of the whole utterance are forced. If we are forced to choose between
true and false, we say “true”, we do so reluctantly, because we recognize that
something isn’t right. In my view, calling the secondary proposition a
conventional implicature isn’t right either.
There
is a fourth and final factor underlying the CI-intuition about a binary
connective like ‘but’: because specifying the two conjuncts exhausts the entire
content of a sentence like (1) except for the contribution of ‘but’ itself,
spelling out its contribution requires adding an extra clause, as in (1+):
(1+) (i) Shaq is huge, (ii) Shaq is agile,
and (iii) there is a certain contrast
between being huge and being agile.[25]
If we had to decide whether (1+)
specifies just what (1) says or more than what it says, we would probably be
disinclined to count (iii) as part of what is said in (1). (1+) has one more clause
than (1), and ‘but’ by itself does not seem to have the force of an entire
clause. Indeed, (iii) in (1+) mentions the properties of being huge and being
agile, which already figured in (i) and (ii), for a second time. So spelling
out the contrast indicated by ‘but’ requires one more clause than is contained
in the original utterance. Consequently, if the import of ‘but’ is part of what
is said and we want to spell out its import in a specification what is said, we
would have to include all three clauses, as in the following extended indirect
quotation:
(1EIQ) Marv says that Shaq is huge, that he is agile, and that there
is a
certain
contrast between being huge and being agile.
I suggest that one reason we are
disinclined to count the content of the last clause of (1EIQ) as part of what is said is that
(1EIQ) renders what is said in (1) as
having more conjuncts than it has clauses.[26]
However,
there is a natural, more straightforward way of reporting what someone says in
uttering (1):
(1IQ) Marv
says that Shaq is huge but that he is agile
Here the word ‘but’ is included
in the specification of what is said. It seems to me that the tendency of Grice
to suggest, and others to agree, that the contrastive import of ‘but’ is merely
a conventional implicature is the result of insisting on separating the
contrastive import of ‘but’ from its conjunctive import, as in (1EIQ). One is led to posit a
conventional implicature here only by implicitly forcing the specification into
a set of independent conjuncts, whereupon it must either include one clause too
many or omit the contrastive import of ‘but’. However, no extra clause is
needed if the word ‘but’ is included in the specification of what is said, as
in (1IQ). In the
next section I will offer an explanation of why ‘but’ and similar terms can
make a propositional contribution— they function as a kind of propositional
operator—without adding an extra conjunct to the proposition expressed by
sentences in which they occur.
I
have identified four factors that contribute to the CI-intuition about ‘but’.
They seem to operate also in respect to other terms that are often said to
generate conventional implicatures rather than contribute to semantic content.
First, as the following examples illustrate, uses of the ACIDs ‘so’, ‘even’,
and ‘still’ require contextual filling in:
(29) So Ann gave up smoking.
(30) Bev even likes Jesse Helms.
(31) Cal is still on the phone.
In (29) ‘so’ indicates that there is a certain reason Ann did what
she did but it doesn’t specify that reason, and in (30) ‘even’ indicates that
there are certain more likable (or less unlikable) people that Bev likes, but
it does not specify who. Less contextual filling in is required in the case of
‘still’, no doubt because there is only one possible dimension (time) to which
‘still’ is relevant.[27] However, no matter how much or
how little contextual filling in is required, the need for it does not show
that these terms generate conventional implicatures. Moreover, if the
contextual details were supplied, say as in (29+) - (31+),
(29+) Cigarettes went up to $5 a pack, so Ann
gave up smoking.
(30+) Fond
of Southern politicians in general, Bev even likes Jesse Helms.
(31+) Although
his mother called an hour ago, Cal is still on the phone.
the terms themselves would play
the same roles as before. So context sensitivity is irrelevant to conventional
implicature, as Grice pointed out when contrasting it with conversational
implicature.
The
other three factors explain how our intuitions can downplay the
truth-conditional import of ACIDs. First, our intuitive judgments of truth and
falsity tend to slight the difference between what is stated in an utterance
and its full propositional content, which may also include common ground. In
order for (29), (30), and (31), to be understood (in the assumed context)
without further explanation, it must be understood that cigarettes went up to
$5 a pack, that Bev is fond of Southern politicians, and that Cal has been on
the phone. Spelling them out would only repeat what was already understood. As
we saw in the case of ‘but’, this leads us to exclude their import from what
was said.
Next,
notice that if we do spell out these propositions, by replacing ‘so’, ‘even’,
and ‘still’ with clausal paraphrases that make explicit their import in the
context,
(29p) Because
cigarettes went up to $5 a pack, Ann gave up smoking.
(30p) Not only is she fond of more likable
Southern politicians, Bev likes Jesse Helms.
(31p) Cal has been on the phone (with his
mother for an hour); he is now on the phone.
the falsity of the secondary
proposition (the one which in (29) - (31) is alleged to be merely a
conventional implicature) becomes relevant to the truth or falsity of the whole
utterance. This is evident if we consider the following responses:
(29r) That’s
not true. She gave up smoking because it is hazardous to your health.
(30r) That’s not true. Helms is the only
southern politician Bev likes.
(31r) That’s not true. Cal hasn’t been on the
phone at all—it’s off the hook.
As rejoinders to (29p) - (31p),
they are perfectly natural. On the other hand, they are inappropriate as
responses to (29) - (31) because the secondary proposition is in the
background, so that the possibility of its falsity tends to be disregarded. And
if one were forced to judge (29) - (31) as true or false when the primary
proposition is true and the secondary proposition (the alleged conventional
implicature) is false, one would judge that they are true.
The
last factor is that making the force of ACIDs explicit requires one more clause
than is contained in the original utterance. When this force is spelled out, as
in (29p) - (31p), the result seems semantically inequivalent to the original
utterance just because it has an extra clause. Notice that this extra clause
repeats material from the rest of the sentence (or the previous utterance).
This suggests that words like ‘so’, ‘even’, or ‘still’ function as operators on
that material to yield the additional propositional contents that they do.
4. Expressing Multiple Propositions
I have identified four factors
that contribute to the CI-intuition about the conventional import of ACIDs.
There is, I suggest, an underlying explanation for the effect of at least the
last three. They are aided and abetted by the clandestine operation of a
certain insidious assumption:
(OSOP) Every indicative sentence expresses exactly
one proposition.
This widespread but less than
obvious assumption of one sentence, one proposition is just a version of the
grammar-school dictum that a complete sentence expresses a complete thought,
i.e., exactly one thought. I am not suggesting that philosophers or linguists
have explicitly defended OSOP (although it does seem to operate in much
semantic theorizing) and, in fact, it has been explicitly rejected.[28] All I am suggesting here is that
it functions as an implicit assumption underlying people’s intuitions about
what sentences do and do not say.
What
could have led people to make this assumption, however implicitly? Perhaps the
culprit was not grammar school but logic class. We got used to the standard
truth-functional connectives ‘and’ and ‘or’ and to how they are represented in
the propositional calculus: ‘p’ conjoined with ‘q’ yields the conjunctive
proposition ‘p & q’; ‘p’ disjoined with ‘q’ yields the disjunctive
proposition ‘p v q’. However, this does not show that in general a sentence
whose content includes more than one proposition expresses a composite
proposition (with those individual propositions as components). As we saw
earlier, there are two propositions expressed by (27), for example,
(27) Ann’s computer, which she bought in
1992, crashes frequently.
that Ann’s computer crashes frequently
and that she bought it in 1992. (27) expresses these two propositions, but it does
not express their conjunction. OSOP arbitrarily requires that such sentences
express no more than one proposition (it also disregards the fact noted earlier
(note 14) that many syntactically complete sentences fail to express even one
proposition). With sentences containing ACIDs like ‘but’, ‘so’, ‘even’, and
‘still’, there is no such thing as the proposition expressed—in these
cases what is said comprises more than one proposition. And when the sentence
does so without expressing the conjunction of these propositions, and these
propositions differ in truth value, the sentence as a whole is not assessable
as simply true or simply false.
Once
we reject the assumption of one sentence, one proposition, we are no longer
forced to choose to between treating the import of an ACID as either an
entailment or a conventional implicature. If what is said can comprise more
than one proposition, the presence of an ACID can be responsible for one of
them. This proposition does not have to be regarded as either a conjunct of the
one proposition expressed by the entire sentence or as not part of what is said
at all but merely a conventional implicature. To see how the presence of an
ACID could result in the expression of an additional proposition, look again at
(29) - (31) and the result of paraphrasing its ACID with a clause:
(29) So Ann gave up smoking.
(29p) Because
cigarettes went up to $5 a pack, Ann gave up smoking.
(30) Bev even likes Jesse Helms.
(30p) Not only is she fond of more likable
Southern politicians, Bev likes Jesse Helms.
(31) Cal is still on the phone.
(31p) Cal has been on the phone (with his
mother for an hour); he is on the phone.
Clearly the falsity of the
additional proposition is sufficient for the falsity of the paraphrases. (29p)
is false if Ann did not give up smoking for the reason in question, (30p) is
false if Bev is not fond of other Southern politicians, and (31p) is false if
Cal hadn’t been on the phone. In these cases the additional proposition is not
even a candidate for being a conventional implicature—it is obviously part of
what is said. Now I am not suggesting that this is just as obvious with (29),
(30), and (31). In these cases, the additional proposition in question is not
expressed as a separate clause (as a conjunct in a conjunctive proposition),
for there is a different way in which this proposition comes into play.
Terms
like ‘but’, ‘so’, ‘still’, and ‘even’ function as operators of a special sort.
I call them preservative operators because in operating on a sentence
(or phrase) to yield a new proposition, they preserve the original proposition.
If, for example, ‘O’ is a unary preservative operator on sentences and
expresses the property of being F, and ‘S’ expresses the proposition that p,
then ‘O(S)’ expresses both the proposition that p and the proposition that
F(p). To illustrate, the occurrence of ‘still’ in (31) indicates that the same
state of affairs expressed by the sentence that ‘still’ operates on obtained
during some interval up to the reference time. In the case of ‘so’, which is a
binary operator, its occurrence in (29) indicates that what is expressed by the
sentence that follows it is a consequence of what was expressed by the
preceding one (which may be merely understood). Obviously, the
suggestion that ACIDs are
preservative operators needs to be developed in detail. Such an account would
indicate, for each ACID, whether it is a unary or a binary operator, how, if
the term is binary, it picks up the first of its operands from prior discourse
or context, what property or relation it ascribes to its operand(s), and how
the precise character of this property or relation is determined by context.
As
observed earlier, our intuitions about sentences like (29), (30), and (31) tend
to be insensitive to the falsity of the secondary proposition being expressed.
The force of these intuitions is neutralized once we allow that sentences can
express two (or more) propositions of different degrees of prominence, and
their ranking in prominence depends not only on linguistic form but also on
contextual factors. Whatever the exact story of how this ranking is determined,
it pertains not to the semantic question of which proposition(s) an utterance
expresses but only to the psychological explanation of which proposition(s) our
intuitions of truth and falsity take into account and which ones they ignore.
The
OSOP has provided implicit support for the CI-intuition (as well as earlier
intuitions about semantic presupposition) by forcing the terms of the debate.
It requires us to decide whether a certain proposition, e.g. with (31) that Cal was on the phone, is entailed or
merely implicated (or presupposed, when presupposition was the issue). We are
thus forced to judge whether (31) expresses merely the simple (31a) and conventionally
implicates (31b) or expresses their conjunction, thereby entailing both.
(31) a. Cal
is on the phone.
(31) b. Cal
has been on the phone.
But there is another option. On
the multiple-proposition view (31) expresses two propositions, (31a) and
(31b)—it does not express their conjunction and merely entail them. Judgments
about (31) are forced if, when (31a) is true and (31b) is false, we have to
choose between a simple “true” and a simple “false”. The multiple-proposition
view presents another option.
Not
only does OSOP underlie the CI-intuition, it lurks behind the only argument I
am aware of for the CI-thesis. This is the argument mentioned earlier, due to
Karttunen and Peters, who point out that (6), repeated here,
(6) John just noticed that even
Bill likes Mary.
“does not mean that he has just
noticed that other people like Mary or just noticed that Bill is the least
likely person to do so” (1979, p. 13). I claimed that it does not follow that
this proposition is conventionally implicated but only that noticing something,
in this case (5),
(5) Even Bill likes Mary.
does not require noticing
everything necessary for it.
Now
it is interesting to note that Karttunen and Peters observe that there are two
grades of criticism that can be leveled at someone who asserts (5) when (5a), (5b), and (5c) are not all true:
(5) a. Bill
likes Mary.
b. Other people besides Bill like Mary.
c. Of the people under consideration, Bill is
the least likely to like Mary.[29]
An utterance of (5) is deemed false if (5a) is rejected but “partial