Assignment

Due on Monday, September 22nd.

Part 1

Consider the sentences in (1) and (2).

  1. If it’s raining outside, I’ll bring my raincoat.

  2. Jo: What did you think of the movie?
    Bo: It was interesting.

Each of these examples can be understood as involving a conversational implicature. (1) appears to give rise to the implicature that the speaker doesn’t know if it’s raining outside. Meanwhile, (2) seems to imply that Bo may have found the movie less than fantastic. Assuming these implicatures are intended, what conversational maxims are involved in generating them? How are the conversational maxims deployed in each case—go through the reasoning involved (kind of like I did in Applying the maxims). For either one, are there other principles, besides the four conversational maxims, that might be in play?

Part 2

Recall where I mentioned that the sentence in (3) appears to give rise to a scalar implicature, while Bo’s utterance in (4) appears to give rise to an ignorance implicature. The reasoning that is typically hypothesized to generate both implicatures is similar; for example, both the Quantity and Quality maxims are invoked.

  1. Jo did some of the readings.

  2. Jo: What do you want?
    Bo: Something with a lot of caffeine.

What difference(s) between these examples might help explain why you observe only an ignorance implicature in (4)? How does this difference affect the reasoning involved in deriving the implicatures?

Part 3

Consider the examples in (5) and (6).

  1. Jo proved that her trunk was empty.
    ↝ Jo’s trunk was empty.

  2. Bo doesn’t like his sandwich.
    ↝ Bo dislikes his sandwich.

What is the status of each of these inferences? That is, is it an entailment, a conversational implicature, a presupposition, a conventional implicature, or not obviously any of these?