Abstract
According to standard pragmatics, we should account for conversational implicatures in terms of (1975) maxims of conversation. Neo-Griceans like (1981) and (1984) seek to reduce those maxims to the so-called Q and I-principles. In this paper I want to argue that (i) there are major problems for reducing Gricean pragmatics to these two principles, and (ii) that, in fact, we’d better account for implicatures in terms of the principles of (a) optimal relevance and (b) optimal coding. To formulate both, I will make use of (1948) mathematical theory of communication.
This paper reports about work in progress on the use of general theories of action for the semantic/ pragmatic analysis of natural language. This paper is an extension of my original contribution presented at the 2nd SIGdial workshop. I have given a similar presentation at a Stanford workshop on Logic and Infomation in 2000. I would like to thank the participants of those workshops and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. This research has been made possible by a fellowship of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), which is gratefully acknowledged.
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van Rooy, R. (2003). Conversational Implicatures and Communication Theory. In: van Kuppevelt, J., Smith, R.W. (eds) Current and New Directions in Discourse and Dialogue. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 22. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0019-2_13
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