Murphy’s Law as Applied to Field Linguistics—James Crippen SpecGram Vol CLV, No 2 Contents HanjieLinguru III—Trey Jones

Cartoon Theories of Linguistics
Part 14—Gricean Implicature

Phineas Q. Phlogiston, Ph.D.
Unintentional University of Lghtnbrgstn

Welcome to the Cartoon Theories of Linguistics! If you are new to the series, where have you been? We’ve been doing this for almost two years! Go back to the beginning (SpecGram CLII.1) if you need to, to understand our mission:

[W]e should be able to reduce the essence of important linguistic concepts to something we can explain to that bright, interested 10-year-old. In fact, I contend that we can boil the essence right down to something we can explain in a cartoon.
Now, to the heart of this installment—an illustration of the different types of Gricean Implicature:

Gricean Maximums
Gricean Maximums Gricean Maximums
Gricean Maximums Gricean Maximums

When we return: Next time, guest cartoonist Bill Watterson has graciously agreed to bring Calvin and Hobbes out of retirement to illustrate the semantic concepts of transitivity, agentivity and volitionality, especially as these are encoded in Tibetan languages.

References
  1. Carston, R. (1995). “Quantity maxims and generalised implicature.” Lingua, Volume 96, Issue 4.
  2. Davis, W. (1998). Implicature: Intention, Convention, and Principle in the Failure of Gricean Theory.
  3. Grice, H. P., (1975). “Logic and conversation.” In Cole, P. and Morgan, J. (eds.) Syntax and Semantics, Volume 3.
  4. Kasher, A. (1998). Pragmatics: Critical Concepts.
  5. Lee, K., & Eskritt, M. (1999). “Beyond the Gricean Maxims: Conversational awareness as a multifaceted domain of knowledge.” Developmental Science, 3, 27-28.
  6. Pratt, M. L. (1985). “Ideology and Speech-Act Theory.” Poetics Today, Volume 7, Number 1.
  7. Reiter, E. (1990). “The computational complexity of avoiding conversational implicature.” In Proceedings of the 28th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Murphy’s Law as Applied to Field Linguistics—James Crippen
HanjieLinguru III—Trey Jones
SpecGram Vol CLV, No 2 Contents