What inference implies about implicature

Nicole Palffy-Muhoray, Yale University

Abstract

In this talk I analyze the notions of implying and inferring and the surprisingly complex ways that the words themselves are used. I show how these nuanced uses of imply and infer, in combination with a lack of awareness in the pragmatics literature, have obfuscated the understanding of implicature. This perspective illuminates certain gaps in the theoretical paradigm of speaker meaning and utterance interpretation which lead me to argue that what is implicated should be seen as a subset of what is implied. This view has results for the idea of “speaker meaning exhaustivity” (see Saul 2010) and any theories which categorize parts of speaker meaning that are not part of what is said or what is implicated (see Bach 1994, Saul 2002). Finally, I argue for a new concept, I-inference, which is the process a hearer employs to retrieve an implicature. This provides a way to distinguish inferences made based on what a hearer believes a speaker to have meant to communicate from inferences based on personal observations. I-inference has similar properties to implicature and provides a way to naturally incorporate information about utterance interpretation into an explicit, well-defined version of the Gricean program.