Implicatures in Discourse

Guest lecture by Nicholas Asher

Thursday, September 20, 2012 - 15:00 to 16:30

Nicholas Asher (CNRS, France) will talk about Implicatures in Discourse

A characteristic mark of Gricean implicatures in general, and of scalar or quantity implicatures in particular is that they are the result of a defeasible inference. They share this characteristic of defeasiblility with inferences that result in the presence of discourse relations that link discourse segments together into a discourse structure for a coherent text or dialogue. In this paper I apply the tools used to infer discourse relations to the derivation of quantity implicatures. This yields three advantages: at the theoretical level, we have a unified and relatively simple framework for computing defeasible inferences both of the quantity and discourse structure varieties; we can capture what's right about the intuitions of so called "localist" views about scalar implicatures; and we can investigate how D-inferences and scalar inferences interact, in particular how discourse structure triggers scalar inferences.

Nicholas Asher is Research Director at CNRS, Laboratoire IRIT, Université Paul Sabatier, in Toulouse, France. His research interests include various topics in formal semantics, formal pragmatics, philosophy of language and discourse structure and interpretation.  He has published widely within this area; his most recent book is Lexical Meaning in Context: a Web of Words, Cambridge University Press, 2011.

All are welcome, no registration

Further information: Please contact Daniel Hardt, dh.itm@cbs.dk.

The page was last edited by: Communications // 09/11/2012