Simons on Embedded Implications

Another theorist, Simons (2010), also examines embedded scalar implicatures. She suggests extending the Gricean framework to subsententials clauses. However, com- paring her approach with Chierchia’s, she does not see Chierchia’s suggestion as implicature-based in the Gricean sense:

In a very different approach, Gennaro Chierchia (2004) attempts to maintain (a version of) semantic compositionality by arguing that scalar implications are not in fact Gricean implicatures, but are generated by grammatical rule in the course of semantic composition. This allows him to maintain an overall Gricean perspective: first, conventional content and grammatical rules provide a literal content for an utterance. This content can then provide the input to a Gricean process of implicature calculation. (Simons 2010, p.143)

The reason behind Simons’ dissatisfaction with Chierchia’s solution seems to be her considering being clausal to be a must for implicatures. In her view, implicatures can be generated by parts of a sentence, only if the part is in a sentence form. Simons’ idea is less radical than Chierchia’s. She only tries to demonstrate that embedded clauses can also have implicatures. In her examination, the central problem she is interested in is an argument developed by Anscombre and Ducrot (1983) and quoted in Recanati (2003a, p.303):

10_{Another support for local processing of scalar implicatures comes from psycholinguistics ex-}

periments of Storto and Tanenhaus (2004). See Borg (2012, pp.59-60) for a brief description of the experiments.

(a) Conversational implicatures are pragmatic consequences of an act of saying something.

(b) An act of saying something can be performed only by means of a complete utterance, not by means of an unasserted clause such as a dis- junct or the antecedent of a conditional.

(c) Hence, no implicature can be generated at the sub-locutionary level, i.e. at the level of an unasserted clause such as a disjunct or the an- tecedent of a conditional.

(d) To say that an implicature falls within the scope of a logical operator is to say that it is generated at the sub-locutionary level, viz. at the level of the clause on which the logical operator operates.

(e) Hence, no implicature can fall within the scope of a logical operator. For instance, consider the following sentences:

(15) The old king has died of a heart attack and a republic has been declared. (16) If the old king has died of a heart attack and a republic has been declared,

then Tom will be quite content. (Cohen 1971)

In(15), the order of events is implied11_{. In other words, the implicated proposition}

is that the old king has died of a heart attackand then a republic has been declared. The antecedent of (16) seems to have the same implication. If a republic has been declared first and then the old king has died of a heart attack, Tom might not be content, and this seems compatible with the truth of (16) as Simons (2010, p.142) points out. This shows that the consequent of the sentence is evaluated after the implicature of the antecedent is calculated. However, this is a clear violation of the allegedly Gricean view exhibited above; that is only asserted clauses can generate implicatures. Simons’ reaction to this tension is to reject the argument above. She claims that Gricean reasoning also applies to subordinate clauses:

The basis for the general case is that subordinate clauses do not serve merely to contribute to the propositional content expressed in an utter- ance. Typically, these clauses themselves serve identifiable discourse functions. Cooperativity requires these functions to be fulfilled as well as possible. To put this a different way: interpreters can pay atten- tion to parts of sentences independently of the containing sentence, and can reason about why the speaker produced just that sentence-part in

11_{Note that this is not a scalar implicature. So, subsentential implicatures are not always scalar}

attempting to convey her communicative intention. This reasoning, I suggest, is what gives rise to ‘local’ conversational inferences. (Simons 2010, p.145)

In order to elaborate on this idea, Simons needs to show how Gricean maxims can work for subordinate clauses. For instance, with respect to the first maxim of Quantity (“Make your contribution as informative as is required”), the contribution of the speaker does not have to be an assertion in Simons’ view:

But suppose we read Quantity 1 this way: Provide as much informa- tion as is required about the situation you are describing. Or, utilizing the notion of strength: Provide the strongest description of the situation you aim to describe compatible with the requirements of relevance. The idea is this: a speaker’s choice of words is always an indication of some belief she has about the situation she is describing. In the case where the utterance describes this situation as actual, the beliefs in question will be beliefs about what is the case. In the case where the utterance describes the situation as hypothetical, or as merely possible or proba- ble, or as the content of someone’s propositional attitude, the beliefs will be beliefs about what is possible or probable, or about another agent’s beliefs. Quantity 1, I suggest, enjoins the speaker to give the best – in many cases, strongest – characterization of the envisioned situation that is consistent with these beliefs. If the interpreter assumes that the speaker is abiding by this requirement, then she can apply Quantity 1 to the interpretation of non-asserted clauses. (Simons 2010, pp.152-3)

This new interpretation of the Quantity 1 enables Simons to explain embedded im- plicature cases above. She calls this type of implicature “intrusive”. The interpreter seeks the interpretation of the embedded clause “which maximizes the cooperativity of the speaker” (Simons 2010, p.157), and this can involve intrusive implicatures.

For my purpose, one important point in Simons’ discussion is that intrusive implicatures are transparent to global conversational effects. They are not generated in every contexts. The following sentence is a case in point:

(17) If some of my students fail the course, I’ll be unhappy.

In Simons’ view there is no local strengthening here; that is, the reading of the quantifier in the antecedent as “some but not all”, possible in a normal context, is blocked here (or cancelled, in Gricean terms) by the general contextual consid- erations since failure of either some or all of my students will make me unhappy

(Simons 2010, p.155). From this data, Simons concludes that “we must accept that global considerations can have local effects” (Simons 2010, p.158). What she means here by “global considerations” is to consider the interpretation of the conditional as a whole, and then determine the interpretation of the antecedent accordingly.

Let me briefly summarize the above discussion. According to the perceived Gricean view, only asserted sentences can have implicatures. I presented two views that challenge this received view. Simons argues that unasserted subordinate clauses can have implicatures as well. She believes that small modifications of the Gricean framework are sufficient to explain embedded implicatures. Chierchia, in contrast, defends a more radical view in which subsentential implicatures can be calculated phrase by phrase. His examination, however, is limited to scalar implicatures.

Scalar phrases are controversial linguistic phenomena. Apart from the implica- ture approach, there are also explanations which turn to information structure and grammar.12 _{How about non-scalar implicatures? Can embedded clauses generate}

non-scalar implicatures? It seems they can. Let us think of Grice’s gas station example:

(18) A: I am out of petrol.

B: There is a garage round the corner. (Grice 1989, p.32) SupposeA reports B’s words in the following way:

(19) Either he didn’t like me or there is a garage round the corner.

The second disjunct in (19) seems to carry the same implicatures as B’s utterance in (18), namely the garage is open and it has petrol to sell. If so, we can conclude that embeddability is not limited to scalar implicatures.

Of course not all theorists are sympathetic to extending Gricean reasoning to subsentential clauses. As said above, Recanati (2003a), for instance, claims that globality and the awareness of inference (“availability” in his terminology) are re- quired conditions for conversational implicatures (Recanati 2003a, p.300). Since, local implications do not meet these conditions, they should not be seen as impli- catures. Recanati’s suggestion is leaving Gricean theory intact and explaining the phenomenon in question within the framework of his truth-conditional pragmatics theory (Recanati 2003a, p.320).

Recanati also seems to reject conventional implicatures, for they do not meet his globality and availability conditions. In his view, conventional implicatures are not implicatures, and they are for the most part a subject matter for semantics

(Recanati 2003a, p.300). Similarly, another theorist, Bach, rejects that so-called conventional implicatures and scalar implicatures are implicatures (Bach 2006).

In this discussion I take Chierchia and Simons’ side. I reject Recanati’s truth- conditional pragmatics approach in face of the problem that I have discussed in Section 2.4 above. We need a literal meaning and what-is-implicated (implied) distinction even for words and his approach (and other similar approaches) does not satisfy this need. Between Chierchia and Simons, I will follow Chierchia’s method. Simons’ approach has some limitations. Although, she accepts that a hearer can pay attention to an embedded clause and calculate its implicatures locally, there seems to be no place for phrasal implicatures in her approach. When it comes to metaphors this causes problems of the kind mentioned in Section 2.2. Certain metaphors, whether they are embedded or not, do not seem explainable by the clausal approach. Thus, Simons’ suggestion helps us explaining how embedded implicatures work in the Gricean framework but do not help us with metaphors.

Another problem Simons does not address is how certain implicatures can be calculated online, as a parallel process to the sentence interpretation. Simons seems to adhere to the two-step process account of implicatures. In her account, em- bedded clauses can generate implicatures, but the calculation of these implicatures still presupposes the clausal meaning as a whole. As discussed in Section 2.3, if metaphorical meaning is a form of implicature and metaphors can be processed in one step without presupposing the literal meaning of the sentence, then Simons’ approach is not promising in developing an implicature-based theory of metaphor which can also work well at the psychological level.

In the next section, I will present my proposal about the subsentential implica- tures in which I will follow Chierchia’s suggestion that implicatures are “computed phrase by phrase in tandem with truth conditions”. Although Chierchia’s concern is only with scalar implicatures, I will generalize his thought to other types of sub- sentential implicatures.