When cancellation becomes unreasonable

Author:

Macagno Fabrizio1,Graci Roberto2

Affiliation:

1. Department of Linguistics , Universidade de Lisboa , Lisbon , Portugal

2. University of Messina , Messina , Italy

Abstract

Abstract Cancellability – one of the most important tests for implicatures – has been attacked from different perspectives, and its reliability challenged by several cases and examples in which conversational implicatures seem to be hard or even impossible to cancel. To account for these phenomena, distinct approaches have been advanced aimed at weakening Grice’s cancellability test. However, what do we exactly mean when we claim that an implicature cannot be cancelled? Grice pointed out that implicatures are triggered by a possible conflict with the cooperativeness principle, and for this reason it is always possible to opt out of the observation thereof. This theoretical possibility needs to be distinguished from the practical problem of explaining why some implicatures are intuitively less cancellable than others, or even not cancellable. To address this latter – practical – dimension of cancellability, the reasoning and the presumptive premises involved in drawing an implicature and justifying its cancellation needs to be represented and evaluated. This approach will be shown to provide a possible instrument for evaluating the reasonableness of cancellability and its costs.

Publisher

Walter de Gruyter GmbH

Reference80 articles.

1. Åkerman, Jonas. 2015. Infelicitous cancellation: The explicit cancellability test for conversational implicature revisited. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93(3). 465–474. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2014.988738.

2. Atlas, Jay David. 2005. Logic, meaning, and conversation. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

3. Atlas, Jay David & Stephen Levinson. 1981. It-clefts, informativeness and logical form: Radical pragmatics (revised standard version). In Peter Cole (ed.), Radical pragmatics, 1–62. New York, NY: Academic Press.

4. Bach, Kent & Robert Harnish. 1979. Linguistic communication and speech acts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

5. Blome-Tillmann, Michael. 2008. Conversational implicature and the cancellability test. Analysis 68(2). 156–160. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8284.2007.00731.x.

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