Introduction to Pragmatics
(Einführung in die Pragmatik – Einzelansicht)
Summer 2015
Tuesdays 2:30--4:00pm @ 2321.HS 3H
INSTRUCTOR
Todor Koev ([email protected])
Implication relations
 When a sentence is uttered in context, native speakers have sharp
intuitions about what inferences / implications can be drawn from
it.
 We have discussed three types of inferences thus far:
o Entailments (about the literal meaning of words)
o Presuppositions (about what is assumed by the speaker to
already hold)
o Conversational implicatures (derived through reasoning about
the speaker’s communicative intentions)
 We also introduced various empirical diagnostics (e.g., the Family
of Sentences test, the Defeasibility test, etc.) to demonstrate that
those inferences indeed have different properties.
Entailments ()
 Lexically triggered: about semantics, not pragmatically derived.
(1) I own a cat.

I own an animal.
Because:  cat  = {x|x is a cat}  {x|x is an animal} =  animal 
 Non-defeasible: The speaker is committed to the entailments of the
sentence.
(2) # I own a cat but I don’t own an animal.
 Can be blocked: are sensitive to negation and other operators.
(3) I don’t own a cat.

I own an animal.
Presuppositions ()
 Triggered by particular words or constructions.
(4) The present Queen of France hates Paris.
 France has a Queen.
(5) What Bill said was offensive.
 Bill said something.
(definite NP)
(wh-cleft)
 Non-defeasible: The speaker is committed to the presuppositions of
the sentence and assumes the same about the hearer.
(6) # The present Queen of France hates Paris but France doesn’t
have a Queen.
 Project to the position they are introduced.
(7) Jessica’s brother is bald.  Jessica has a brother.
(8) If Jessica has a brother, her/Jessica’s brother is bald. (no pres.)
Conversational implicatures ()
 Arise through reasoning about the particular use of words.
(9) I bought a house.

I didn’t buy two or more houses.
Because: Maxim of Quantity.
 Defeasible: the speaker is not committed to them and can deny
them.
(10) I bought a house. In fact, I bought two of them.
 Can be blocked by operators because partially derived from literal
meaning.
(11) A: How is the weather going to be?
B: Take the umbrella.
 It’s going to rain.
B': Don’t take the umbrella.
 It’s not going to rain.
Questions
 Is this “all there is” when it comes to inferences drawn in language?
 Are there inferences that don’t fit the profile of either of those three
implication relations?
 It seems that, indeed, the inference patterns in language is even
richer.
 We’ll illustrate this on a particular English construction:
appositives.
Appositives
 Appositive constructions are a special kind of modifiers that are
separated from the rest of the sentence by intonation breaks (in
speech) / commas (in print).
 Varieties of appositives:
(12) Appositive relative clause
Lance, who was about to retire, admitted to doping.
(13) Nominal appositive
Stefan Raab, my favorite comedian, was born in Cologne.
(14) Small clause appositive
The representatives, most of them women, wore fancy
attires.
(15) Adjectival appositive
The guest, visibly angry at the host, left the studio.
On the syntax of appositives
 Some terminology:
(16)
Lance
who was 
about
to retire,
to doping
.


 , 

 admitted


anchor
appositive
rest of the sentence
 A basic syntax for appositives:
 Note: Appositives are not always attached to the subject.
Appositive inferences
 Appositives trigger inferences.
(17) Lance, who was about to retire, admitted to doping.
 Lance was about to retire.
(18) Stefan Raab, my favorite comedian, was born in Cologne.
 Stefan Raab is my favorite comedian.
Etc.
 Qs: But what type of inferences? Is intuition enough to tell? Should
we never trust intuitions?
 To find out, we need to run some familiar tests and find out if
appositive inferences are entailments, presuppositions, or
conversational implicatures (or some new beast).
Conventional
 Appositive inferences are clearly conventionally/grammatically
encoded.
 The inference obtained roughly repeats the information contained
in the appositive.
 More precisely: The inference is obtained by attributing the
property stated in the appositive to the NP anchor.
(19) The guest, visibly angry at the host, left the studio.
 The guest was visibly angry at the host.
(20) The representatives, most of them women, wore fancy
attires.
 Most of the representatives were women.
 So appositive inferences are like entailments and presuppositions in
this respect.
Non-defeasible
 Appositive inferences cannot be denied.
 The utterer of the sentence is committed to the appositive inference.
(21) The representatives, most of them women, wore fancy
attires. # They were mostly men.
(22) Stefan Raab, my favorite comedian, was born in Cologne.
# Stefan is pretty funny but he is not my favorite comedian.
 Again, appositive inferences behave like entailments and
presuppositions.
Project
 Appositive inferences project.
 They cannot be canceled by negation, modal operators, or when
placed in questions.
 All of the sentences below imply that Lance was about to retire.
(23) a. Lance, who is about to retire, did not admit to doping.
b. Lance, who is about to retire, might admit to doping.
c. If Lance, who is about to retire, admits to doping, then he
is a good person.
d. Did Lance, who is about to retire, admit to doping ?
 So appositives behave like presuppositions here, not like
entailments.
Presuppositions?
 So inferences triggered by appositives are presuppositions?
 So far this is what we find.
 But not so fast: Are appositive inferences similar to presuppositions
in all possible respects?
 This does not seem to be the case, though.
 Two differences between appositives and presuppositions:
(i) Appositives project in a much stronger sense than
presuppositions.
(ii) Appositives share some discourse properties with entailments
and differ from presuppositions.
Appositive projection
 Both presuppositions and appositives project.
 However: Presupposition projection can be blocked (as discussed
last time) while appositive projection cannot.
(24) If Jessica has a brother, then Jessica’s brother is bald.
(The presupposition of Jessica’s brother is blocked.)
(25) # If Lance took doping, then Lance, who took doping, will
lose all of his titles.
(Sentence is just infelicitous.)
 Try the same with other presupposition-blocking environments
(conjunction and disjunction, discussed last time), and you’ll get
similar results.
 So: Appositives project stronger than presuppositions!
Appositives in discourse
 Presuppositions like to “repeat” discourse-old information.
(26) Bill moved to Hawaii. But now he/Bill regrets it / that he
moved to Hawaii.
 In contrast, appositives need to introduce new information.
(27) Bill moved to Hawaii. #But now Bill, who moved to Hawaii,
wants to go to Indonesia.
 Appositives behave like entailments/assertions in this respect.
(28) Bill moved to Hawaii. #He moved to Hawaii.
 This also explains why (25) above is bad: the appositive repeats old
information.
Appositive inferences:
presuppositions or entailments?
 Appositive inferences share properties with both presuppositions
and entailments:
o Like presuppositions, they project.
o Like entailments/assertions, they introduce fresh information.
 We can think of appositive inferences as “projective entailments”.
 Such projective entailments have a different name in the literature:
conventional implicatures.
 Note: This name is very confusing and unfortunate (because
appositives have precious little to do with conversational
implicatures!) and is due to the way the field developed. But we’ll
stick with it.
Conventional implicature
 One analysis of conventional implicatures says that they are
secondary entailments with their own truth conditions.
 Main idea: Sentences that trigger conventional implicatures have
two truth values.
 Example:
(29) Mars, the third planet from the Sun, is blue
Mars is the third planet from the Sun, Mars is blue
1, 0 
The logic behind
 In classical logic sentences have single truth values: one truth-value
per sentence.
 For sentences with conventional implicatures, we need two (or in
the general case, multiple) truth values.
 Two-dimensional logic:
 main assertion , conventional implicature 
1,
1,
 0,
 0,
1
0
1
0
 We assume that operators only interact with the first/main
assertion dimension, that’s why conventional implicatures project.
Intuitions about 2D semantics
 But is a particular sentence with appositives “true” or “false”?
 For example, what about a 1, 0  -sentence?
(30) Düsseldorf, the biggest city in Germany, has about 600,000
inhabitants.
 Q: Is the sentence both true and false? Does it make sense to even
ask for a single truth value?
 Q: If the sentence is plain false, how could we explain our
intuitions if we want to preserve the two-dimensional logic?
For next time
 Please read sections 4.3-4.5 from the Birner textbook.