Double Subjects and Conventional Implicatures

International Review of Pragmatics 1 (2009) 249ndash292

copy Koninklijke Brill NV Leiden 2009 DOI 101163187730909X12535267111570

brillnlirp

1 Example (1a) is taken from Perini ( 2002 sect393) and (1b) is example (751b) in Azevedo ( 2005 )

William Salmon University of British Columbia Vancouver Canada

williamsalmonubcca

Abstract Th is paper considers the class of meaning that Grice (1975) referred to as conventional implica-ture (CI) Th ere has been a great deal of discussion on this topic since the work of Potts (2005) and much new data has been brought to bear on the subject However in the midst of this new work we have got away from Gricersquos original conception and the fact that CIs as defi ned by Potts are diff erent than what Grice originally intended is often overlooked

Th e dislocation construction known as a double-subject sentence (DSS) makes a nice test case for exploring the two conceptions of conventional implicature I show that the DSS meets three of Pottsrsquo four CI criteria quite readily Yet Pottsrsquo criterion that CIs be speaker-oriented mdash which distinguishes them from Gricean CIs mdash is diffi cult to illustrate for the DSS I then show that this criterion is empirically unsustainable and so should be abandoned Th is leaves us with a system that is essentially Gricean in which the DSS is given a straightforward account

Keywords conventional implicature double subject Grice Potts speaker-oriented

1 Introduction

Th is paper investigates a type of dislocation construction in spoken Brazilian Portuguese vernacular (BPV) which I refer to as a double-subject sentence as in (1a-b) 1

(1) a Esse presidente o imposto estaacute cada vez mais alto lsquoTh is president taxes are getting higher and higherrsquo

b Horaacuterio de veratildeo eu nunca lembro de acertar ateacute algueacutem me dizer lsquoDaylight saving time I never remember to set (my watch) until some-one tells mersquo

Th is paper considers the DSS in terms of conventional implicature (CI) which is a class of meaning that was fi rst described in Paul Gricersquos William James

250 W Salmon International Review of Pragmatics 1 (2009) 249ndash292

lectures at Harvard in 1967 2 Gricersquos conventional implicature has been refor-mulated recently in several publications by Chris Potts ( 2005 2007a -c) I argue in the present paper that Pottsrsquo reformulation is fl awed in important ways however and I show that the DSS provides a useful test case in discrimi-nating between the two competing CI approaches

Potts requires his CIs to be speaker-oriented in indirect speech reports but it is diffi cult to illustrate this requirement for the DSS as the DSS is a main-clause phenomenon and cannot be reported in indirect speech However this requirement is an innovation on Pottsrsquo part it does not appear in Gricersquos origi-nal conception of conventional implicature and it is ultimately the distin-guishing factor between Pottsrsquo CIs and those Grice originally described To complicate matters for Potts this criterion seems to be empirically unsustain-able for Pottsrsquo own data and so Potts runs into problems in distinguishing between the two views of conventional implicature

I show ultimately that it is straightforward to provide a CI treatment of the DSS in Gricersquos original terms and I also suggest that some of Pottsrsquo conven-tional implicatures might be better thought of as species of presuppositions Before turning to conventional implicature however it is necessary to fi rst consider some empirical facts about the DSS

11 Th e DSS in Previous Literature

Th e sentences that I am referring to as DSS in Brazilian Portuguese have been mentioned occasionally in the linguistics literature over the last several years For example Pontes ( 1987 ) argues that the frequency of such sentences in Brazilian Portuguese is evidence that BPV should be considered a topic-prominent language as in the typology of Li and Th ompson ( 1976 ) Similarly the reference grammars of Perini ( 2002 ) and Azevedo ( 2005 ) list a few exam-ples of the DSS and note the frequency of the sentence type in the language Kuong and Flannery ( 2006 ) present a syntactic account of the construction and argue for its value in redefi ning the left periphery Th e account of the basic DSS grammar that follows in sect12 below is based on Kuong and Flanneryrsquos description with a few innovations which are laid out in more detail in Salmon (forthcoming) Crucially none of the abovementioned works con-sider the DSS in terms of conventional implicature

2 ldquoLogic and conversationrdquo the lecture in which Grice discusses conventional implicature appeared in Cole and Morgan ( 1975 ) However all of the lectures were widely circulated in manuscript form from 1967 forward Th ey were collected and published together in Grice ( 1989 ) which is the source of citation for the present essay

W Salmon International Review of Pragmatics 1 (2009) 249ndash292 251

12 Th e DSS Grammar

Th e DSS is composed essentially of an initial parenthetical constituent (NP1) which is then followed by a sentence Th is sentence is the main point of the utterance and its form is basically unrestricted ie it can be an assertion a question and so on 3 Some basic features can be noted of the initial constitu-ent however which I shall illustrate below

NP1 can be characterised with the following properties (i) the requirement of a part-whole or hyponymy relationship with NP1 and some constituent of the primary sentence (ii) NP1 must be referential or generic (iii) NP1 lacks selectional relations with the main verb (iv) the initial constituent is not resumed in the main sentence with a resumptive pronoun (v) there must be an intonational break between NP1 and the primary sentence

We can see the part-whole or hyponymy relationship in the subcategory tulipas of the more general fl ores in (2a) 4 Th is requirement appears to be prag-matically determined Th at is it is quite clear that tulipas is conventionally a hyponym of fl ores but it is less clear that taxes are a hyponym of president in (2b) However in a given situation we can easily construct a general class denoted by president which includes taxes

Th e next requirement is that the dislocated noun is generally either generic or referential respectively As such it generally bears no marking as in (2a) or is marked with a defi nite article or demonstrative as in (2b)

(2) a Flores a Maria gosta de tulipas fl owers the Maria like3sg tulips lsquoFlowers Maria likes tulipsrsquo

b Es se presidente o imposto estaacute cada vez mais alto Th is president taxes are getting higher and higherrsquo

c Animais de estimaccedilatildeo eu falei com aquele menino sobre cachorros ontem lsquoPets I talked about dogs with that kid yesterdayrsquo

d O Lula presidente vocecirc acha que as coisas estatildeo melhorando lsquoLula [being] president do you think things are getting betterrsquo

Th e next requirement which is the lack of selectional relations between NP1 and the main verb can be seen above in (2a) in which NP1 fl ores is plural while the verb gosta de lsquolikesrsquo agrees with the singular subject Maria

3 See Perini ( 2002 sect393) and Azevedo ( 2005 ) for examples of variation in the primary sen-tence form See also examples (2a-d) below 4 Examples (2a) and (2c) are Kuong and Flanneryrsquos (2006) examples (3a-3b) Example (2b) is taken from Perini ( 2002 sect393) and (2d) is (751a) in Azevedo ( 2005 )

5 See sect531 below for more on activation and accessibility

Th e fourth feature of the DSS is the lack of a coreferential or resumptive relationship between the dislocated element and any aspect of the primary sentence In this way the construction diff ers from traditional left-dislocation constructions that are commonly associated with Ross ( 1967 ) in which the dislocated element does corefer with some element in the primary sentence

Finally the intonational break between NP1 and the following sentence mdash marked in (2a-d) with commas mdash is an important feature to consider as it will play an important role below in the discussion of the DSS and the comma intonation of Pottsrsquo conventional implicatures

13 DSS Information Structural Properties

Th e referent of NP1 can be anything that is contextually accessible According to Chafe ( 1987 25) an accessible concept is ldquoin a personrsquos peripheral con-sciousness a concept of which a person has a background awareness but one that is not being directly focused onrdquo An accessible referent then might be one that is recoverable from previous discourse or it might be one that is somehow environmentally salient without being the current topic of discourse Th is contrasts with an activated concept which is a concept that is being focused on directly such as the referent of an unaccented pronoun as described in Lambrecht ( 1994 94) 5 If a speaker uses a DSS in which the referent of NP1 is already activated in the discourse the result is redundant In (3) the acti-vated topic of discourse is clearly carnes lsquomeatsrsquo We see this from Gradinhorsquos question and in Mariarsquos response to it as she describes diff erent kinds of carnes Th us in her fi nal lines when she wishes to mention costela lsquobeef ribsrsquo it is unnecessary for her to direct the topic of discourse to carne with NP1 It is uncontroversial that costela are a kind of carne and the result of NP1rsquos misdirection is clearly redundant

(3) Gradinho Quais satildeo suas carnes favoritas Maria Eu adoro todos os tipos de carne Minha favorita eacute picanha Eu

tambeacutem gosto de pernil deporco assado Carne costela satildeo deliciosas

Grady What are your favourite meats Mary I love all kinds of meat My favourite is beef fl ank-steak Also

I like pork butt roast Meat beef ribs are delicious

It would be much more acceptable here for Mariarsquos fi nal utterance to be absent of NP1 as in Costela satildeo deliciosas Th is potential for redundancy will be very

6 Grice does however elaborate on the notion further in the Retrospective Epilogue to the collected lectures in terms of formality and dictiveness See Grice ( 1989 361) Similarly in earlier work from 1961 we can get a sense for the direction Grice would ultimately take with conven-tional implicature

important below in the discussion of Pottsrsquos (2005) requirement that conven-tional implicatures contribute discourse-new information

2 Conventional Implicature Th e Gricean Story

Gricersquos primary description of conventional implicature occurs in a rather brief paragraph in ldquoLogic and conversationrdquo (1989) It was not a class of mean-ing which much interested Grice and it was introduced primarily as a means of characterising and distinguishing the essential properties of conversational implicature in which Grice was directly interested Here are Gricersquos words

In some cases the conventional meaning of the words used will determine what is implicated besides helping to determine what is said If I say (smugly) He is an Englishman he is therefore brave I have certainly committed myself by virtue of the meaning of my words to its being the case that his being brave is a conse-quence of (follows from) his being an Englishman But while I have said that he is an Englishman and said that he is brave I do not want to say that I have said (in the favoured sense) that it follows from his being an Englishman that he is brave though I have certainly indicated and so implicated that this is so I do not want to say that my utterance of this sentence would be strictly speaking false should the consequence in question fail to hold So some implicatures are conventional unlike the one with which I introduced this discussion of implicature (1989 25-26)

Th is is essentially all we are given by Grice 6 Th e CI is a kind of meaning asso-ciated with the conventional meaning of a lexical item which is not truth conditional but which is also not cancellable

In the next section I turn to Potts ( 2005 2007a -c) and his reformulation of Gricersquos notion of conventional implicature It will become clear in sect31 that Pottsrsquo concept of conventional implicature diff ers in important ways from what Grice originally described As such I will refer henceforth to the tradi-tional Gricean conventional implicature as CI and to the conventional impli-cature of Potts as the ldquoNew Conventional Implicaturerdquo (NCI)

3 Th e New Conventional Implicature

Potts ( 2005 ) makes very clear that his semantic theory of conventional impli-cature is to account for many kinds of data that had not previously been

7 Pottsrsquo reduction is faithful to Gricersquos paragraph for the most part Th ere are a couple of problems though Th e fi rst stems from the way component (a) is implemented in regard to Pottsrsquo parentheticals and expressives Th e second problem is that the ldquoentailmentrdquo part of (b) does not necessarily hold for Grice Th e third problem is Pottsrsquo innovation of ldquospeaker-oriented-nessrdquo in component (c) which is not derivable from Grice I discuss these and other problems in sect5 below

discussed as such like nominal appositives and nonrestrictive relative clauses (what Potts refers to as supplementary relatives ) He also considers honorifi cs and epithets in addition to other kinds of expressive content In fact he pur-posefully bypasses the traditional CI data such as but therefore and even which he claims do not meet his defi nitional requirements of [N]CIs Th us he keeps part of Gricersquos defi nition of CIs but he argues that it ultimately doesnrsquot apply to Gricersquos data

Potts suggests that various grammatical elements contribute multidimen-sional information but that this multidimensional information must stand in a certain relation to a primary assertion viz it is a comment upon a primary assertion or it helps the hearer to better understand a primary assertion We will see below that this description is also well-suited to the DSS

Th e rest of this section is spent laying out Pottsrsquo arguments in favour of his NCIs as well as his justifi cation for their constituting a distinct class of mean-ing Th is latter question essentially requires illustrating Pottsrsquo claims that con-ventional implicature as he arranges it cannot be parcelled off into other classes of meaning ie into presupposition conversational implicature entailment and the like We turn fi rst to the defi ning features of Pottsrsquo NCIs

31 Abstract Properties of the New CIs

Potts begins his task with a close reading of Gricersquos paragraph on conventional implicature which is quoted in its entirety above in sect2 From this paragraph Potts distils four essential points which I quote in (4) 7

(4) a [N]CIs are part of the conventional meaning of words b [N]CIs are commitments and thus give rise to entailments c Th ese commitments are made by the speaker of the utterance lsquoby vir-

tue of the meaning of rsquo the words he chooses d [N]CIs are logically and compositionally independent of what is lsquosaid

(in the favoured sense)rsquo ie independent of the at-issue entailments

Pottsrsquo NCIs are those bits of language that meet all four of the criteria in (4) We can see how they apply to one of Pottsrsquo stock examples in (5a-b) [Potts ( 2005 ) ex (213c)] which contains a nominal appositive

(5) a Ames the former spy is now behind bars b Ames the former spy is now behind bars But I donrsquot think Ames is

a former spy

Th e NCI component of (5a) is the appositive the former spy Th e requirement in (4a) holds that the NCI must be part of the conventional meaning of the relevant words Th at is the meaning in question is not cancellable in the sense of a conversational implicature If we attempt a cancellation of (5a) we see that the result is incoherent as in (5b) Th us the meaning contributed by the appositive is part of the conventional meaning of the words

Now consider (4b) which is Pottsrsquo second CI requirement Th is requires that the NCI meaning is a commitment of the speaker Th e incoherent can-cellation in (5b) is illustrative for this requirement as well and it suggests that the meaning expressed in the appositive is indeed a commitment of the speaker

Th e next of Pottsrsquo requirements in (4c) is speaker-orientedness Th e rele-vant content must be attributed to the speaker of the utterance even if that utterance is embedded as part of an indirect speech report Consider (6) in which the sentence with nominal appositive is embedded under the verb say

(6) John Ames the former spy is now behind bars Tony John said that Ames the former spy is now behind bars

According to Potts even though the appositive the former spy is a part of what John said originally when it is reported by Tony it is attributed to Tonyrsquos utterance Th us it appears as if Tony is contributing the nominal appositive to the indirect report of Johnrsquos utterance Potts suggests this property holds for parentheticals as well as expressives and that it is a crucial criterion for group-ing into a coherent class the kinds of forms that contribute NCIs

Th e last of Pottsrsquo criteria in (4d) returns us to Gricersquos paragraph We can focus here on Gricersquos lines

But while I have said that he is an Englishman and said that he is brave I do not want to say that I have said (in the favoured sense) that it follows from his being an Englishman that he is brave though I have certainly indicated and so impli-cated that this is so I do not want to say that my utterance of this sentence would be strictly speaking false should the consequence in question fail to hold (1989 25)

Th e favoured sense of what is said for Grice refers to the semantic content of an utterance and it contrasts with what is implicated What is said is con-strained by the conventional content of the particular sentence (allowing for a narrow context to establish referents of indexicals essentially time and place

of utterance) 8 Potts uses the term at-issue entailment to cover Gricersquos what is said as the term at-issue entailment also has a built-in contrast with the sec-ondary entailments of Pottsrsquo supplement data

Potts interprets Gricersquos lines to mean that NCIs are distinct from at-issue entailments In (6) above the at-issue entailment is identifi ed with the con-tent contributed by the main sentence Ames is now behind bars Th e nominal appositive represents a secondary entailment for Potts It is this distinction that provides the feeling of ldquouneasiness one has about the semantic value of an utterance containing a false or inappropriate conventional implicaturerdquo (2005 10)

According to Potts (7a) expresses the primary assertion in (7b) as well as the secondary (and false) assertion in (7c) [Potts ( 2005 ) ex (238)]

(7) a Lance Armstrong an Arkansan has won the 2003 Tour de France b Lance Armstrong has won the 2003 Tour de France c Lance Armstrong is an Arkansan

Armstrong is of course from Texas not Arkansas but this does not prevent us from understanding from the utterance that Lance Armstrong did in fact win the 2003 Tour de France Th at the secondary assertion mdash ie the NCI content mdash is false does not aff ect the basic truth of the primary assertion for Potts 9

Potts uses Gricersquos conception of conventional implicature as a starting point He abstracts his criteria from Grice and then proceeds to see if the combina-tion of these criteria (plus requirement (4c)) picks out a coherent class of meanings As I have suggested though there are questions to be raised regard-ing Pottsrsquo criteria and I will return to this below in sect5 Before doing so how-ever I fi rst want to lay out some other important aspects of Pottsrsquo approach especially his justifi cations for NCIs as a distinguished class of meanings

32 NCIs versus Other Classes of Meaning

Potts ( 2005 2007a -c) is careful to give arguments that the data he considers to contribute conventional implicatures cannot also be analysed as other kinds

8 See Bach ( 1999b ) for an in-depth discussion of narrow and broad contexts and their rela-tion to Gricersquos sense of what is said 9 Bachrsquos (1999a n25) judgements on appositives diff er from Potts though ldquothe longer or more important the material between the commas the more one is inclined to regard it as rel-evant to the truth or falsity of the entire utterancerdquo Here Bach is close to Fregersquos position on the contributions of nonrestrictive relatives Recall Fregersquos (1892 38) famous Napoleonic exam-ple in (i) and his description of it ldquoIf the entire sentence is uttered as an assertion we thereby simultaneously assert both component sentences If one of the parts is false the whole is falserdquo

of meaning In this section I briefl y run through some of his arguments to this end questioning some of them where I see fi t and supporting them at other times Pottsrsquo arguments are laid out most succinctly in (2007b) so most of what follows is based directly on that source

321 NCIs versus Conversational Implicature Potts lists three properties of conversational implicature which his NCIs are shown not to possess these are calculability malleability (ie cancelability) and reinforceability Essentially these are all used to illustrate that the conver-sational implicature meaning is derived from contextual infl uence and that they depend on both speaker and hearer adhering to principles of rational behaviour NCIs on the other hand are not calculable but depend instead on conventional aspects of the lexical item or construction in question As in (5b) above Potts suggests the NCIs are also not cancellable 10 Lastly Potts suggests NCIs are not reinforceable With conversational implicatures a speaker has the option of continuing on to state them outright without being redundant An NCI does not always have this option Th us the attempted reinforcement of (8) is infelicitous on many occasions 11

(8) Lance Armstrong the cyclist battled cancer He is (also) a cyclist

322 NCIs versus At-Issue Entailment For Potts at-issue entailment is comparable to Gricersquos favoured sense of what is said NCIs can contain similar descriptive content to the at-issue entailment of an utterance but importantly the NCIs must be in a relation to the at-issue content in which the NCI is somehow secondary or deemphasised 12 Th us in (9) below [Potts ( 2007b ) ex (6)] if the hearer responds No or Th atrsquos not true the hearer will be understood as having responded to the at-issue entailment Lance Armstrong battled cancer

(9) Lance Armstrong the cyclist battled cancer

(i) Napoleon who recognized the danger to his right fl ank himself led his guards against the enemy position

10 I will illustrate below in sect5 that this generalisation doesnrsquot hold consistently 11 As I show below in sect531 there can be exceptions to this claim depending on the activation status of the NCI content Th ere are also cases where the reinforcement is in rhetorical opposi-tion to the ldquoredundantrdquo information and so is acceptable as in (i)

(i) Lance Armstrong the cyclist successfully battled cancer But after all he is a cyclist See Horn ( 1991 ) on marking contrast and rhetorical opposition

12 Bach ( 2006 ) contests this however noting that the primary assertion of an utterance can be in the appositive

13 See Horn ( 2002 ) for more on assertoric inertia 14 See Karttunen and Peters ( 1979 ) Ladusaw ( 1983 ) and Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet ( 2000 ) on CIs as presuppositions 15 It is far from obvious that presuppositions need to be background information Potts ( 2007b ) suggests that for presuppositions to be backgrounded is ldquothe preferred option in many casesrdquo However there is a growing body of literature on presupposition accommodation that shows presuppositions are commonly not background information See von Fintel ( 2006 ) for a useful overview of the phenomena and relevant literature Also see Huang ( 2007 86-87) for discussion of presuppositions and new information

Th is suggests that the NCIs are assertorically inert 13 Potts suggests NCIs are also scopally inert Th at is they pass through pre-

supposition holes We can illustrate with the antecedent of a conditional as in (10) [Potts ( 2005 ) ex (244)]

(10) Th e press said nothing about Ames But if as the press reported Ames is a spy then the FBI is in deep trouble

According to Potts the as -parenthetical in the second sentence is scopeless and so projects out of the conditional confl icting with the previously asserted content

323 NCIs versus Presupposition Conventional implicature and presupposition are often considered to be dif-ferent terms for the same concept 14 Potts attempts to illustrate that this termi-nological disorder is unwarranted and that a clear distinction can be made between his NCI data and the traditional presuppositional data He relies primarily on two diagnostics to illustrate his case ie diff ering behaviours in terms of backgrounded information and diff ering behaviours in regard to pro-jecting out of attitude complements Potts suggests presuppositions (unlike NCIs) must be backgrounded and he suggests presuppositions (unlike NCIs) should be plugged in complements of attitude verbs such as believe

Th e fi rst piece of evidence Potts suggests is antibackgrounding ie Potts claims that backgrounded NCIs will be redundant as in (8) above However according to Potts presuppositions are normally backgrounded in this way as in (11) below in which the presupposed information that Lance is a cyclist is felicitous in the second sentence rather than being redundant 15

(11) Lance is a cyclist But the reporter did not realize that Lance was a cyclist until after their interview

A second piece of evidence Potts suggests is that NCIs project out of atti-tude complements Th us in (12) [Potts ( 2007b ) ex (11)] the presupposition

16 Th e presupposition of possession is of course more general than simply X owning Y Th e description of ownership is from Pottsrsquo example 17 Potts credits this terminology to Emonds ( 1976 ) It can be seen to originate a bit earlier though Th ere is a similar use in Tucker ( 1939 87-88)

Sam owns a kangaroo 16 does not project out of the complement and so the speaker is able to deny that Sam owns a kangaroo

(12) Sue believes that Samrsquos kangaroo is sick but thatrsquos ridiculous mdash Sam doesnrsquot own a kangaroo

We can compare this to an example where the speaker is not allowed to deny the presupposition that Sam owns a kangaroo in (13)

(13) Samrsquos kangaroo is sick but thatrsquos ridiculous mdash Sam doesnrsquot own a kangaroo

Now compare the behaviour of an NCI such as a nominal appositive in (14) [Potts ( 2007b ) ex (12)]

(14) Sue believes that Chuck a confi rmed psychopath is a suitable babysit-ter mdash but Chuck isnrsquot a psychopath

Unlike the presupposition in (12) the NCI content a confi rmed psychopath does not project out of the attitude complement and Potts suggests that a distinction should be drawn between NCIs and presuppositions as two kinds of meaning We will see in sect5 below however that these (and other) diagnostics are much less decisive than Potts makes them out to be Th e antibackgrounding require-ment is not actually an issue of redundant information it is rather an issue of activation status of a referent in a discourse As such it needs to be reformulated in terms of pragmatic activation I also show below that the projection diagnos-tics do not distinguish NCI content from presuppositions Th e result is that Pottsrsquo distinction between the two kinds of meaning is much less compelling

In sect4 I show how Pottsrsquo framework as it is presently arranged can be used to provide an account of the DSS Th e DSS is closely related to Pottsrsquo supple-ment data and it depends on the same device of comma intonation to separate the NCI content from the semantic content of the primary assertion Before turning to the DSS and the abstract properties of NCIs then it is worth con-sidering this syntactic feature in a bit of detail

33 Comma Intonation

Crucial to Pottsrsquo analysis of primary and secondary content especially with the parenthetical supplements is what he refers to as ldquocomma intonationrdquo 17

18 Pace Potts it seems to me that the relevant readings in (15) and (16) are distinguished by diff erent intonation patterns as well as Pottsrsquo comma feature Th is data is further complicated by the fact that both the sentence-adverb and the integrated reading can be supported whether or not the comma intonation is present Consider (i) in which the adverb luckily is fully integrated but in which it is used to make a comment on the primary assertion Th e lines above the example sentence are used to mark intonation starting out high sentence-initially and falling toward the end of the sentence Th e reading of (i) might be paraphrased as something like Willie won the pool tournament (luckily for me) where the adverbial makes a comment on the primary assertion rather than contributing a manner reading to it

(i) _____ ___________________

_____ Willie won the pool tournament luckily I had a lot of money riding on him but he domi-nated the game from the beginning Hersquos the best Irsquove ever seen Th ere was no luck involved

In (i) there is no comma intonation to separate integrated content from NCI content (or to separate a manner reading from one that is speech-act related) We can see that the adverb should not be given a manner reading as the speaker does not contradict herself later on when she sug-gests that Willie did not win by luck In any case (15) and (16) seem to be generally ambiguous between sentence-adverb and integrated readings Th is is not surprising when we consider with Bolinger ( 1989 186) that ldquoadverbs that comment parenthetically on the truth value of an utterance tend to fuse with the frame sentence anyway and then are no longer recognisable as parenthesesrdquo Strong comma intonation does seem to distinguish between levels of content in some cases but it does not do so consistently Th is is a problem for Potts A further and only partially related bit to note about (i) is that it seems to contradict Morzyckirsquos (2008) claim that integrated adverbs receiving nonrestrictive readings must occur in a leftward position

Th is is a feature of the syntax which has semantic consequences Potts depends heavily on this intonational break represented by commas dashes etc in written language to distinguish NCI content from primary asserted content Th e comma intonation marks a shift from at-issue content to NCI content Th us consider the supplemental versus integrated adverbs in (15) and (16) respectively [Potts ( 2005 ) ex (4121) (4122)] According to Potts the sen-tences in (15) and (16) are exactly alike except for the intonational breaks in the (a) sentences 18 Potts considers the supplemental adverbs in (15) to con-tribute NCIs while he suggests the integrated manner adverbs in (16) do not Th us for Potts the sole distinguishing property here between the NCI-contributing supplemental adverb and the integrated manner adverb is the syntactic feature of comma intonation

(15) a Willie luckily won the pool tournament b Willie won the pool tournament luckily

According to Potts supplemental adverbs in (15) comment on the outcome of the pool tournament Th at is it was lucky for the speaker or for Willie that he ended up winning So the supplemental adverb contributes the proposition that the speaker views the primary proposition as positive In (16) Potts reads the integrated adverb as a comment on the means by which Willie won the tournament Willie did not win by skill alone He also had a bit of luck Th us the adverbs in (15) and (16) take two diff erent scopes the supplements in (15) take wide scope over the entire primary proposition the integrated adverb in (16) is a manner adverb taking narrow scope

As I have discussed above the initial NP of a DSS must always be set off by an intonational break Th is suggests that similar to Pottsrsquo NCIs NP1 is not semantically coordinate with the primary assertion and thus an immediate parallel is provided to Pottsrsquo supplements Th e question then is whether the NCI defi nition in (4) above can pick out the DSS in addition to the supple-ments that are the focus of Pottsrsquo work I suggest that it does

4 Th e DSS and Abstract Properties of the New CIs

Pottsrsquo abstract properties of NCIs are given above in (4) and I include them here for sake of convenience

Th e rest of this section runs through the individual criteria as they apply to the DSS

41 NCIs Are Part of the Conventional Meaning of Words

It is clear that the meaning provided by NP1 of the DSS depends directly on the lexical content of the words that compose the noun phrase Th ere is no mystery with this requirement No contextual inference is necessary peixe means lsquofi shrsquo and churrasco means lsquobarbecuersquo and these are used in ordinary senses of the words Th e only reason that these noun phrases are of interest is because they are related to a primary assertion in a certain way Th e content of NP1 is essentially equal to what Potts would refer to as at-issue content It is just by virtue of the syntactic position and comma intonation that NP1 is

placed into a relation of what Potts refers to as conventional implicature Th us there seems to be no chance of NP1 being in violation of the fi rst criterion

42 NCIs Are Commitments and Th us Give Rise to Entailments

Th is part of Pottsrsquo criteria is also straightforward in that it is not possible to deny what is contributed by NP1 Th ere is no sense in which NP1 is required to implicate something or where anything is used non-literally in (17) If by the use of the DSS one is meaning to reintroduce or reactivate a referent it follows that that referent cannot then be denied

(17) Gradinho Quais satildeo suas carnes favoritas Maria Eu adoro todos os tipos de carne Minha favorita eacute picanha

Eu tambeacutem gosto de pernil deporco assado Peixe sardinhas satildeo deliciosas Mas eu natildeo estou falando sobre peixe

I like pork butt roast Fish sardines are delicious But I am not talking about fi sh

Th e incoherence of the denial suggests quite clearly that use of the NP1 pres-ents a commitment rather than a cancellable implicature

43 NCIs Are Commitments Made by the Speaker of the Utterance

Th is part of Pottsrsquo defi nition is a little harder to illustrate for the DSS Th e pri-mary means of testing for speaker orientation is through the use of indirect speech reports embedding under verbs like say However for the DSS embedding of any kind is not possible as NP1 has a strict requirement to be sentence-initial

Potts claims that under embedding the content of supplements and epithets are identifi ed with the speaker of the matrix construction and from this he suggests that these forms follow the current utterance rather than the one being reported Th at is those constructions are syntactically embeddable while semantically and pragmatically un embeddable However with the DSS it is just not possible to embed them at all Th ey are a syntactically unembed-dable main-clause phenomenon

For example if we embed the DSS in (18a) as in (18b) it is necessary to insert an additional intonational break after dourado lsquodolphinrsquo the grammati-cal subject of (18a) Th is changes the meaning and the syntax dramatically In the embedded (18b) peixe lsquofi shrsquo which was formerly NP1 now has become the grammatical subject while dourado has become a nominal appositive

19 Cf Birner and Ward ( 1998 ) 20 See Bach ( 1999a ) for a lengthy discussion of utterance modifi ers Also see Th orne ( 1972 ) Jackendoff ( 1972 ) and Bellert ( 1977 ) for early treatments

(18) a Peixe dourado eacute o melho lsquoFish dolphin is the bestrsquo

b Gustavo disse que o peixe dourado eacute o melho lsquoGus said that fi sh dolphin is the bestrsquo

c Gustavo disse que o peixe dourado eacute o melho lsquoGus said that fi sh dolphin is the bestrsquo

Without the additional pause (18b) would be simply incoherent as in (18c) Or it might be considered an anacoluthon with a change of plan mid-utterance As it stands though the embedding example in (18b) is no longer the kind of construction with which we are concerned

Th us we cannot embed the DSS directly But this is not too surprising Th e semantically reduced form of NP1 requires it to be anaphorically linked to the relevant context 19 Th us we can supplement NP1 with additional con-tent and observe how this lessens its contextual dependence and so allows embedding Consider a more prototypical topic marker like falando em lsquospeak-ing of rsquo in (19b) which can do similar work to the DSS in (19a) Th is topic marker is much freer syntactically than the bare NP1

(19) a Churrasco as costelas estatildeo prontas lsquoBarbecue the ribs are readyrsquo

b Falando em churrasco as costelas estatildeo prontas lsquoSpeaking of barbecue the ribs are readyrsquo

Given the right intonation it is possible for this construction to be embedded as in (20) with falando em churrasco attributed to the speaker of the matrix sentence

(20) Joatildeo disse que falando em churrasco as costelas estatildeo prontas lsquoJohn said that speaking of barbecue the ribs are readyrsquo

So in this way we can see a kind of indirect evidence of speaker-orientedness for NP1 Now this is not conclusive evidence but it is at least encouraging evidence And Potts faces a similar diffi culty with some of his data namely utterance modifi ers such as confi dentially frankly between you and me etc which are a special class of supplements 20

Th ese kinds of utterance modifi ers pattern just like the DSS as they do not embed and they ldquoare restricted to matrix occurrences because they require

arguments that have main clause forcerdquo (2005 147) Th is can be seen in (21) and (22) [Potts ( 2005 ) ex (4140a-b)] 21

(21) Confi dentially Alrsquos wife is having an aff air (22) Bill said that confi dentially Alrsquos wife is having an aff air

In (21) Potts suggests the adverb bears a relation between the speaker and the utterance namely that the utterance is being made confi dentially Th is is clearly not the case in (22) which if anything means Alrsquos wife is having an aff air confi dentially But even this reading is not forthcoming So we can fi nd a quasi-parallel between the utterance modifi ers in (21) and (22) and the ldquoembeddedrdquo DSS in (18a-c) above both in their syntactic behaviour under embedding and in the way their semantic contributions change in the embedded sentences

Potts includes utterance modifi ers as NCIs under his system even though he cannot illustrate speaker-orientedness due to the unavailability of the embed-ding diagnostic His justifi cation here is that utterance modifi ers like his other NCIs take main clauses as arguments And like his other NCIs utterance modifi ers modify ldquothe relation between a speaker and a particular utterancerdquo (2005 147) As further evidence of this last claim Potts notes following Bellert ( 1977 349) that utterance modifying adverbs can appear with speak-ing which is not the case with many other kinds of adverbs Consider (23) [adapted from Potts ( 2005 ) ex (4143)]

(23) a speaking possibly b speaking obviously c speaking amazingly

Th en compare the ability of utterance-modifying adverbs

(24) a speaking frankly b speaking soldier to soldier c speaking confi dentially

Pottsrsquo point with the contrast between (23) and (24) is to suggest that utter-ance modifi ers take the speaker of the utterance as one of their arguments He doesnrsquot pursue this line of argumentation further neither will I except to note that the DSS can be paraphrased in a fashion very similar to that of the utter-ance modifi ers as in the paraphrase of the DSS I noted above in (19) with the speaking of X examples

21 Th e original use of these examples is Bach ( 1999a 358) However Bach uses them for a slightly diff erent purpose

Pottsrsquo (2005 147) description of utterance modifi ers as modifying ldquothe relation between a speaker and a particular utterancerdquo is reminiscent of the DSS With the DSS however we can say that it modifi es a relation between a particular utterance and some aspect of previous discourse Th is latter point is reminiscent of the way Levinson ( 1983 87) describes the discourse deictic properties of Gricean CIs

Th us while it is diffi cult to show the extent to which the DSS meets the speaker-oriented requirement of Pottsrsquo defi nition we can see that their behav-iour is comparable in this way to Pottsrsquo own utterance modifi ers which he considers to be legitimate NCIs

44 NCIs Are Logically and Compositionally Independent of What Is Said

According to Potts NCI content should not aff ect the basic truth of the pri-mary assertion As was demonstrated above NP1 has no selectional relations with the verb of the primary assertion Th ere need only be a very loose prag-matic relation with the grammatical subject which is consistent with Pottsrsquo supplements Crucially though this relation doesnrsquot seem to have an eff ect on the primary sentential semantics We can remove NP1 and what is said in the primary assertion does not change

Now removing or altering NP1 may change the context in which the pri-mary assertion is true Consider (25a-b) [Perini ( 2002 sect393)]

(25) a Illinois tornado eacute muito comum lsquo(In) Illinois tornadoes are very commonrsquo

b Rhode Island tornado eacute muito comum lsquo(In) Rhode Island tornadoes are very commonrsquo

Th e locative NP1 in (25a) could be changed to some other location as in (25b) which would render diff erent conditions of truth but this would not be due to the semantic composition of what is said in the primary utterance Th e diff er-ence in truth would be a result of what is said being uttered in diff erent contexts Th at is in (25a) the NP1 Illinois creates a context in which what is said in the rest of the utterance is true Th is is similar to what happens with demonstratives like that when the accompanying demonstrations point to diff erent demon-strata Th e primary task of NP1 is to situate the root sentence in a context While altering NP1 might result in a primary utterance that is infelicitous or misplaced in context it does not result in one that is semantically ill-formed

We can follow Potts to further illustrate the independence of the content of NP1 from at-issue content Potts demonstrates that if assertions containing speaker adverbs are denied it is the content of the primary assertion that is denied not that of the speaker-oriented adverb Consider (26) [Potts ( 2005 ) ex (317)]

(26) Unfortunately I was home when my parole offi cer called

According to Potts if the hearer responded No to (26) she would be denying only that the speaker was home when the parole offi cer called not the unfor-tunateness of the situation Similarly if the hearer responded with the ellipti-cal question Why to (26) she would not be questioning the lack of fortune but rather the primary assertion itself

Th e BPV examples we have seen thus far pattern the same way Recall (17) from above

(17) Peixe sardinhas satildeo deliciosas lsquoFish sardines are deliciousrsquo

If the hearer were to respond Natildeo to (17) she would not be denying the rela-tion between fi sh and sardines Rather she would be denying that sardines are delicious Similarly if the hearer queried Por que she would be asking why the hearer thought sardines were delicious not why a relation holds between fi sh and sardines

If the hearer did wish to dispute this relation she would have to use some-thing like Karttunen and Petersrsquo (1979 12) and Pottsrsquo (2005 51) ldquoWell yes buthelliprdquo construction

(27) Well yes but sardines are not meat

Potts echoing Karttunen and Peters argues that the existence of this kind of negation strategy strongly suggests multiple levels of meaning

Th e same eff ect is possible with NP1 in BPV Th e character varies slightly but the same means of disputing the relevant content or relation exists with Sim satildeo mashellip lsquoyes they are buthelliprsquo as in (28)

(28) Sim satildeo mas sardinhas natildeo satildeo carne lsquoYes they are but sardines are not meatrsquo

As with (27) the diagnostic does seem to verify the presence of two levels of meaning in the DSS And like Pottsrsquo supplements the content of NP1 does seem to be distinct from what is said in the primary assertion

45 Summary DSS and Abstract Properties of the New CIs

It seems then that the DSS patterns in accordance with the criteria Potts sets up to defi ne his NCI data Of the four parts of the defi nition given in (4) only the speaker-oriented requirement gives us any pause regarding the DSS However I have shown how it is possible to adapt the indirect argumentation used by Potts to account for his utterance modifi ers to also account for the DSS

22 Grice ( 1989 122) also mentions moreover suggesting that the meaning is ldquolinked with the speech-act of addingrdquo And in the Retrospective Epilogue (1989 361) he mentions on the other hand However in neither of these latter two examples does he provide example sentences

5 Questioning the Abstract Properties of the New CIs

In the present section I consider in a bit more detail two of Pottsrsquo abstract requirements for NCIs ie NCIs as lexical content in (4a) and the require-ment that NCIs be speaker-oriented as in (4c) Th e data and judgements discussed below uncover what I see as inconsistencies in Pottsrsquo use of these criteria Th at is the lexical requirement seems not to apply evenly across expressives and supplements and the speaker-oriented requirement results in the exclusion of a signifi cant amount of data on strictly theoretical grounds

I do not address directly Pottsrsquo extensive formalism or the predictions it makes My questions are primarily empirical yet I think they are of suffi cient importance to investigate in some detail and to give reason for looking beyond the NCI as it is currently formulated

51 Th e Lexical Requirement

Requirement (4a) is derived directly from specifi c phrases in Gricersquos original mention of the phenomenon such as ldquothe conventional meaning of the words used will determine what is implicatedrdquo and ldquoby virtue of the meaning of my wordsrdquo (Grice 1989 25-26) Here is the lexical requirement as derived by Potts ( 2005 11)

(4) a CIs are part of the conventional meaning of words

Grice gave us very few actual examples of conventional implicature His best known is use of but in (29a) 22

(29) a She is poor but honest b She is poor and honest

In this example as long as the basic conjunctive relation is true (29a) and (29b) will be true in all the same situations Th e complex conjunction but includes the basic conjunctive relation as well as an additional something which is said to be the conventional implicature component For Grice it is the word but itself that induces an additional meaning Th is is the source of phrases such as ldquoby virtue of the meaning of my wordsrdquo Th us Pottsrsquo inclusion

23 Potts adapts this example from Cruse ( 1986 272)

of (4a) as part of his criteria for NCIs especially the expressives seems appro-priate Consider the expressive (30) [Potts ( 2007b ) ex (5b)] 23

(30) a Shut that blasted window b Descriptiv e Shut that window c [N] CI I am in a heightened emotional state relating to that window

being open

In (30a) the expressive modifi er blasted contributes the NCI content in (30c) Th is NCI content does not aff ect the at-issue entailment content in (30b) In examples such as this one it is clear that the NCI content is dependent on the conventional meaning of the relevant words Th is intuition does not follow as straightforwardly with Pottsrsquo supplemental data however

Th ere is nothing about the lexical composition of the supplements to induce an implicature Consider (31) [Potts ( 2007b ) ex (6a)] and the NCI the cyclist

(31) a Lance Armstrong the cyclist battled cancer b Descriptive Lance Armstrong battled cancer c [N] CI Lance Armstrong is a cyclist

Th e NCI here depends wholly on comma intonation In as far as there are multiple dimensions of meaning present in (31) establishing those levels of meaning requires the separate intonational tier produced by the pauses before and after the nominal appositive Th is in itself has nothing to do with the conventional meaning of the words the cyclist Th e nominal appositive con-tributes its normal lexical content within the separate intonational tier but the NP itself and the words that compose it do not themselves induce an implica-ture or any other kind of nonstandard meaning Th us we seem to be working here under two defi nitions of (4a) which are approximated in (4ai) and (4aii)

(4a) i Th e CI mechanism itself is part of the conventional meaning of the words expressives therefore but etc

ii Th e CI mechanism is external and in addition to the conventional meaning of the words of the syntactic construction supplements NP1 etc

As such Pottsrsquo use of the supplements as NCIs needs a bit of clarifying in regard to this requirement It is not the NP or appositive content that is the

24 Ward and Hirschberg are thinking of conventional implicature on the Gricean system rather than the Pottsian one 25 Th ough as I mentioned above in note 9 Frege and Bach claim otherwise about the contri-butions of appositives and nonrestrictive relatives

NCI it is rather the intonation itself Th is requires a bit of an extension on Gricersquos original description of CIs However extensions like this have been made in the past For instance Ward and Hirschberg ( 1985 ) suggest that fall-rise (FR) intonation contributes a conventional implicature of uncertainty Th eir claim is not analogous to Pottsrsquo though 24 For Potts the comma intona-tion conveys nothing in itself It just serves as a function for separating levels of content

For Ward and Hirschberg the FR intonation is consistent in its implicature of uncertainty Whereas for Potts it is not clear that every instance of comma intonation results in an NCI For instance Potts mentions slifting (Ross 1973 ) and tag questions (Culicover 1992 ) as two instances of comma intonation which do not result in NCIs Th ese are exemplifi ed in (32) and (33) respec-tively [Potts ( 2005 ) ex (44a-b)]

(32) Max it seems is a Martian (33) Max is a Martian isnrsquot he

Potts excludes these kinds of examples from other NCIs because they fail to meet the requirement of (4d) above ie they are not independent of the at-issue meanings of the primary assertions However if it were the comma into-nation itself that contributed the conventional implicature as is the case with Ward and Hirschbergrsquos FR intonation the examples in (32)-(33) turn out to be problematic for Potts Th at is if the intonation break is the same for appos-itives as it is for the slifters then we should expect a CI or at least an NCI in both cases Th is cannot be the case though for Potts because he is also bound to the independence requirement in (4d) Slifters do aff ect the truth condi-tions of the primary utterance whereas Potts claims that appositives and other NCIs do not aff ect truth conditions 25

Another type of example that seems problematic along the same lines is the discourse particle like as described in Siegel ( 2002 ) According to Siegel the discourse particle like which is set off by an intonational break just as apposi-tives are has real eff ects on the semantic core of the sentence For instance in the sluicing examples in (34) and (35) [Siegel ex (36) and (37)] Siegel claims like introduces a restricted free variable that is required in sluicing the eff ect of which is that strong determiners can be licensed in a context normally con-sidered to be restricted to only weak and indefi nite determiners

26 Examples (36a) and (37a) are acceptable on a ldquoreminder deixisrdquo reading See Gundel et al ( 1993 302) Also Mey ( 2001 57) mentions examples such as Th ere is that overturned car at Touhy See Ward and Birner ( 1995 ) for additional counterexamples to the claim that only weak or indefi nite determiners can appear in the postverbal position of there -sentences 27 See also Kay ( 2004 ) on truth-aff ecting hedges such as technically speaking strictly speaking loosely speaking and so on Th e hedges reside on their own intonational tier as an NCI does yet they have real eff ects on the truth conditions of the primary utterance

(34) a Th ey spoke to every student but wersquore still wondering (exactly) who b Th ey spoke to like every student but wersquore still wondering (exactly)

who (35) a Th e principal suspended the school bully wersquoll have to wait to fi nd

out (exactly) who b Th e principal suspended like the school bully wersquoll have to wait to

fi nd out (exactly) who

Th e same eff ect is seen for Siegel in existential there sentences in (36) and (37) [Siegel ex (38) and (39)] Th at is the existential sentence normally allows only weak or indefi nite determiners Yet in the presence of like this restric-tion does not hold

(36) a Th erersquos every book under the bed 26 b Th erersquos like every book under the bed (Observed Speaker para-

phrased this as lsquoTh ere are a great many books under the bed or the ratio of books under the bed to books in the rest of the house is rela-tively highrsquo)

(37) a Th erersquos the school bully on the bus b Th erersquos like the school bully on the bus (Observed Speaker para-

phrased this as lsquoTh ere is someone so rough and domineering that she very likely could with some accuracy be called the school bully that person is on the busrsquo)

Th e point here with Siegelrsquos data is the same as that above with Rossrsquo slifting data 27 Th ey both have comma intonation but neither of these parenthetical-type data can be NCIs for Potts For Potts they would be excluded on the basis of the independence requirement in (4d) On the other hand Potts makes very clear that it is the intonational break or comma-intonation which induces the NCI in the fi rst place

Th e problem is this Pottsrsquo NCI mechanism only induces NCIs sometimes For the times that comma intonation does deliver an NCI as with nominal appositives it involves an additional step that is not the case with the lexical CIs and the intonational CI of Ward and Hirschberg On the times when the

28 See Bakhtin ( 1981 ) on double-voicedness or what Bakhtin referred to as dvugolosnost Jespersen ( 1924 290) refers to a similar kind of indirect speech as ldquorepresented speechrdquo 29 Personal communication with Potts October 15 2007 30 See Potts ( 2005 12) for a discussion of this unwarranted move by Karttunen and Peters ( 1979 ) and the results of that move

comma-intonation does not deliver an NCI a theoretical means of excluding the data is required

52 Speaker-Orientedness

For Potts every NCI is required to be speaker-oriented However as is made clear below this generalisation is not borne out empirically Often it is diffi cult to distinguish ownership of the NCI content between the speaker of the indirect report and the original speaker in a kind of Bakhtinian double-voicedness 28 In addition there are many other cases where the apparent NCIs are not oriented to the speaker at all

I have two kinds of criticism of this part of Pottsrsquo NCI requirement Th e fi rst is that speaker-orientedness isnrsquot a part of Gricersquos conception of conven-tional implicature as is noted in Amaral et al ( 2007 ) Th is is an innovation on Pottsrsquo part which is based on his reading of other work by Grice 29 Grice him-self does not mention speaker-orientedness or anything like it in the few places where he does discuss conventional implicature and I donrsquot see any reason for making it a requirement the way Potts does

Th is in itself is not that much of a criticism As Potts suggests the point is to put the four abstract NCI properties together and see if combined they can pick out a meaningful class of meaning However his use of Gricersquos label has resulted in a certain amount of terminological confusion Th at is the two concepts of conventional implicature are ultimately divergent and so it is necessary to specify whose brand of conventional implicature is at issue in a given reference Th is doesnrsquot always happen however and Pottsrsquo framework is often considered to be a more formal instantiation of Gricersquos ideas Care must be taken here however as the CI class of meaning has been the victim of ter-minological confusion in the past Recall the result of Karttunen and Peters ( 1979 ) and their reading of Grice in which CIs had to be backgrounded 30 One result of this was that conventional implicature came to be viewed as synonymous with pragmatic presupposition for many years thereafter Hence my use of the term the ldquonew CIrdquo to cover Pottsrsquo data rather than Gricersquos term ldquoconventional implicaturerdquo

My second criticism has to do with the fact that Pottsrsquo data are not al -ways speaker-oriented When articulated carefully there are clear cases of speaker-orientedness to be had But in more naturalistic data there are fre-quent cases where judgements vary widely

In a recent review of Potts ( 2005 ) Amaral et al ( 2007 sect33) have criticised the empirical soundness of Pottsrsquo claim Th ey suggest that speaker perspective or viewpoint might play a role in determining whether an NCI is speaker-oriented or not Th eir idea is that by default the viewpoint of an utterance and so the expressive content contained therein rests with the speaker but in some cases such as in free indirect discourse it is possible to shift the view-point to another perspective Th ey compare this arrangement to the shifting of deictic elements in indirect speech and suggest that in a similar fashion it is possible to shift the expressive content of some NCIs away from the speaker 31

Now Amaral et alrsquos primary means of illustrating these shifting view -points is by providing additional co-text which shows that the relevant topic-oriented adverb or parenthetical as the case may be should not be interpreted as speaker-oriented in the indirect report However while their points are well-taken I suggest that they ultimately donrsquot seem to be addressing the intu-ition that Potts is concerned with Th at is Pottsrsquo data feel like they are speaker-oriented we want to interpret them that way Importantly I think that much of Amaral et alrsquos data feels speaker-oriented too like it should be interpreted as speaker-oriented It is only when we take into account the surrounding co-text that we can then infer that the relevant content is not meant to be speaker-oriented Th e intuition or feeling of speaker-orientedness is still there however Th is results in a criticism that is ultimately less satisfying than one would desire Consider (38) [Amaral et alrsquos (25)]

(38) Joan is crazy Shersquos hallucinating that some geniuses in Silicon Valley have invented a new brain chip thatrsquos been installed in her left temporal lobe and permits her to speak any of a number of languages shersquos never studied She believes that thoughtfully they installed a USB port behind her left ear so the chip can be updated as new languages are available

Amaral et al claim that the embedded adverb here cannot be consistently taken as speaker-oriented Now it is certainly possible to attain an under-standing here in which thoughtfully is not speaker-oriented as Amaral et al

31 See also Black ( 2006 ) and Wilkins ( 1995 ) on a comparison of deictics and expressive speech acts

suggest However this understanding requires a close parsing of the preceding context and it requires us to calculate and to conclude that the adverb should not be speaker-oriented there But the example still feels as if it should be speaker-oriented especially if the comma intonation is fully observed It is only the confl icting information that causes us to reason that it shouldnrsquot be speaker-oriented Th e most natural reading here actually seems to be one that is speaker-oriented in which the speaker of the indirect report is expressing sarcasm about Joanrsquos crazy beliefs

I have similar concerns about Amaral et alrsquos other counterexamples as well Letrsquos consider one more this time an expressive in (39) [Amaral et al ex (28)]

(39) Context We know that Bob loves to do yard work and is very proud of his lawn but also that he has a son Monty who hates to do yard chores So Bob could say (perhaps in response to his partnerrsquos suggestion that Monty be asked to mow the lawn while he is away on business)

Well in fact Monty said to me this very morning that he hates to mow the frigginrsquo lawn

Based on the context here we can reason that Bob most likely would not defame his lawn in such a manner and so perhaps frigginrsquo should be associated with someone elsersquos perspective But this isnrsquot a natural reading Th is is one that we must conclude after the fact mdash ie after we have determined that Bob is not in fact being sarcastic which strikes me as the most natural reading here Th at is Bob seems to be mocking his sonrsquos horticultural orientation Another reading here which would also seem more natural than Amaral et alrsquos would be if frigginrsquo were accompanied by air quotes as a kind of mixed quota-tion However neither of these more natural readings would be counterex-amples to Potts

My criticism of Pottsrsquo speaker-oriented requirement goes well beyond that of Amaral et al As I have suggested they depend on additional co-text to illustrate that a shifted perspective is necessary for a coherent reading how-ever their examples seem to illustrate their claims in a fashion that requires us to work out the details but which is less intuitive or natural Th at is we must work out the fact that the NCI in question should not be interpreted as speaker-oriented In contrast I illustrate that we can vary the intonation mel-ody loudness and other paralinguistic factors and see a much cleaner more intuitive loss of the speaker-oriented requirement for Pottsrsquo data Similarly with the expressive examples I illustrate that whether they are part of a defi -nite- or indefi nite marked-NP makes a substantial diff erence in whether or not the data appear to be speaker-oriented And importantly Potts only con-siders expressives in defi nite-marked NPs

32 My use of pitchtonemelodyintonation etc clearly needs to be defi ned more precisely I think for the purpose of the immediate criticism however the results are clear In general the relation between tone or intonation and speaker commitment in reported speech seems to be an area which could benefi t greatly from psycholinguistic research

521 Indirect Reports in Varying Voices In determining speaker-orientedness a lot depends on the prosodic qualities of the indirect report and on the accompanying expressive information that is conveyed as a result A report can be made in a tone of voice that suggests the speaker is bored by what she is reporting or contemptuous or a speaker can make her report sarcastically Similarly the loudness of the reporterrsquos voice mdash and stress on individual constituents mdash can have real consequences on which content is viewed as reported and on which content should be identifi ed with the maker of the report 32

What seems to be happening in the several cases I provide below is that the tone or prosodic quality of the reporterrsquos voice contributes an additional expressive or attitudinal meaning such as contempt or boredom embarrass-ment etc Th is attitudinal meaning provides cues as to how the indirect report should be interpreted and entered into the common ground What is interest-ing for our purposes is that the attitudinal meaning often takes precedence over the NCI qualities of the actual words reported Th is enables a speaker to indirectly report an NCI and at the same time to distance herself from its NCI qualities Now the point in what follows is not to provide a specifi c account of an interrelation of voice and expressive meaning and so on but rather it is to note its infl uence in interpreting indirect reports Unlike the isolated indi-rect reports found in linguistics essays situated indirect reports in actual speech are produced in actual contexts and with specifi c intonations pitches moods and so on and these factors certainly play a role in the hearerrsquos inter-pretation In the examples that follow we will see that in cases where the expressive qualities of voice or mood clash with the NCI content of an indi-rect report it is quite straightforward to orient that NCI content away from the speaker

Letrsquos look at an example in which the speaker of an indirect report is bored by her message Consider a scenario where Maria speaking on the phone to her younger sister utters (40)

(40) Tony the guy down the street is coming for dinner tonight

Th e younger sister might then hold the phone away from her face turn to her mother and say (41) in a bored and off hand manner

33 Exclamation points here signal loudness 34 An even clearer lack of speaker-orientedness can be seen if the copula is cliticised to the preceding NP of the appositive as in (i) in which the fi nal pause is somewhat reduced Th e same is true in (ii) in which cliticisation occurs across the intonational boundary (Both (i)-(ii) should be considered to be articulated in the same manner as (42) above)

(i) Maria said that Tony the guy down the streetrsquos coming for dinner tonight (ii) Maria said that Tony the guy down the streetrsquos coming for dinner tonight

Th is cliticisation in (i) might signal that the appositive is partially integrated and so is no longer a true appositive or NCI Itrsquos also not clear to what extent wersquore dealing with indirect quotation here or mixed quotation If the latter then the rules would change Yet it is diffi cult to know when we are dealing with direct quotation indirect quotation or mixed quotation as there seems to be a continuum from fully non-coordinate and speaker-oriented to fully integrated and not speaker-oriented However it is necessary to know what kind of quotation we are dealing with because there will be eff ects on speaker-orientedness

[speaking boredly] (41) Maria said that Tony the guy down the street is coming for dinner

tonight

In an off hand report like this the parenthetical seems far less speaker-oriented Th at is it is perfectly natural to associate it with Maria rather than the speaker of the indirect report

Now imagine that Mariarsquos younger sister is required to raise her voice loudly to make the indirect report mdash perhaps the person she addresses is in another room of the house Th is seems to have even less potential for being speaker-oriented especially if the speakerrsquos pitch is kept consistent throughout the indirect report

[shouting] (42) Mummm Maria said that Tony the guy down the street is coming for

dinner tonight 33

Th us it seems that pitch or tone can be more important in determining the structure of a report than does an intonational break 34 With the consistent pitch the entire indirect report mdash parenthetical and all mdash seems blended together and seems to belong to the original speech act being reported ie the parenthetical is not speaker-oriented

Similarly if the younger sister made the indirect report in (41) in a fashion that mimicked the tone or some other recognisable quality of Mariarsquos voice it would be diffi cult to associate the parenthetical back to the younger sister Perhaps Maria has a way of speaking which is distinctly recognisable as her own Maybe her family has teased her often for her exaggerated Valley speak and her younger sister mocks her thus

35 Jespersen ( 1931 151) refers to this adjustment of indexicals in indirect speech as ldquoback-shiftingrdquo Also see Banfi eld ( 1982 25) and Bach ( 1999a 340) on deictic adjustments in indirect speech reports

(43) Like Maria said that like Tony the guy down the street is like coming for dinner tonight

Th is example is of course loaded with additional parenthetical breaks and we saw above in sect51 with the discussion of Siegelrsquos data that this usage of like does seem to have eff ects on the semantic qualities of the sentence Still there is no sense in which the primary parenthetical the guy down the street must be interpreted as speaker-oriented here In this case it is quite clear that a per-spective shift of the kind identifi ed by Amaral et al ( 2007 ) has occurred Th e older sisterrsquos Valley style is recognised in the indirect report and so the content conveyed is assumed to originate with her as well

Turning to expressives now we can see that sound quality plays an impor-tant role in interpreting them as well Consider (44) in which an angry neigh-bour shows up at a party and threatens violence unless the loud music is turned down Th e teenager who is hosting the party then indirectly reports the neigh-bourrsquos threat to the police

(44) Neighbour You better stop all this racket or Irsquom gonna kick your damn speakers in

[on the cell phone excitedly] Teenager Hello offi cer Th erersquos a man here Hersquos pissed and hersquos huge

and he said that hersquos gonna kick my damn speakers in

In (44) the neighbourrsquos use of the expressive adjective damn makes his feelings toward the loud speakers known It seems unlikely however that any hearer of the teenagerrsquos indirect report would attribute this expressive content to the teenager It seems more likely to be relativised to the angry neighbour In other words it is not clear that the expressive is speaker-oriented in the indirect report A possibility here is that the teenagerrsquos report is actually direct or mixed quotation however the fact that the pronouns in the teenagerrsquos speech are adjusted to refl ect the agency of the violence (I gt he) and the ownership of the speakers (your gt my) seriously questions this possibility 35

A diff erent question we must consider here is what if the teenagerrsquos use of damn were to be interpreted as speaker-oriented It makes no sense to suggest that he would be expressing disdain for the speakers in the same way the neigh-bour did On the other hand damn could be speaker-oriented here and expres-sive of the teenagerrsquos general agitated state in the face of his neighbourrsquos threat

and so not commenting on the speakers at all but rather functioning as a gen-eral fl avouring particle But this still doesnrsquot get us to the direct and clear kind of speaker-orientedness that is present in Pottsrsquo strong expressive examples

Now consider the admonishment below in (45) which Cody assigns to Brody Th e sheepish manner in which Brody reports Codyrsquos insult seems to clash with the expressive qualities of the reported NCI and so shelters Brody from association with it

(45) Cody You need to get your thumb out of your ass and get back to work

[sheepishly] Brody Cody said that I need to get my thumb out of my ass and get back

to work

Consider another example in which the indirect speech report contains the expressive fucking jerk 36 in object position of the complement sentence 37 In (46) Tonyrsquos hesitation before making the indirect report suggests a desire to distance himself from the expressive term and we can imagine him reporting it in an apologetic tone Importantly though there is no indication in this example of a direct quote on Tonyrsquos report It is a pure indirect report of Johnrsquos expressive language and we can see from the way the dialogue progresses that Bob does not process the slur as speaker-oriented to Tony His anger is right-fully directed at John

36 Horn ( 2007 ) notes that Potts ( 2005 ) relies primarily on expressive adjectives to illustrate his claim that no [N]CI item should ldquocontribute both an at-issue and a CI-meaning [Potts ( 2005 7)]rdquo However Horn shows that nominal epithets such as asshole and reprobate do contrib-ute both at-issue and CI-meaning thus upsetting Pottsrsquo strong generalisation See also Cruse ( 2004 57) Th e same seems true of minimisers such as a red cent a drop sleep a wink and so forth in the system of Israel ( 1996 ) According to Israel these items are propositionally equal to some minimal unit of measurement However an additional part of their meaning is emphatic or informative in Israelrsquos terminology Informative meaning for Israel is pragmatic or rhetorical in nature Th us sentences like (i) and (ii) are truth conditionally equivalent for Israel but (ii) is more informative (or expressive in the terminology of Potts)

(i) John doesnrsquot have money (ii) John doesnrsquot have a red cent

37 It seems in general that expressives located in object position are less speaker-oriented in indirect reports than their subject counterparts Why this should be is unclear but the syntactic infl uence does raise questions for a purely semantic account such as the one Potts provides Perhaps it is related to the well-known subject-object asymmetry in existential presuppositions fi rst discussed in Strawson ( 1950 )

(46) Context Tony and John are talking Bob walks up and joins the conver-sation John then walks away

Bob Hey what was John saying Tony Well uh he saidhelliphe said that you had been acting like a fuck-

ing jerk Bob What

Tony Yeah I told him that that was some BS and for him to take off Bob Th at bastard

If the expressive content of fucking jerk were associated with Tony the speaker of the indirect report we would expect his fi nal utterance to be unacceptable However there is no sense of a contradiction or linguistic error in Tonyrsquos fi nal utterance Similarly as is evident in Bobrsquos fi nal utterance his anger at the insult is directed at John the source of the insult rather than Tony who was the reporter

Th ese examples illustrate that the expressive manner in which an indirect report is made can override or defeat NCI content within the indirect report which would seem to point toward a more presuppositional kind of meaning than a non-cancellable CI meaning In a sense we might also consider this additional or external expressive information as a kind of context in which to interpret the indirect report In this case then we would in a way be returning to the criticism against Potts raised by Amaral et al mdash namely that the speaker-oriented requirement can be done away with in the face of confl icting contextual information

An important diff erence between the examples I have presented here and those found in Amaral et al is that the examples here are obviously not speaker-oriented Th e external expressive content clashes with or defeats the NCI content and we are not compelled to a speaker-oriented reading as we are with Amaral et alrsquos data where the absence of speaker commitment had to be inferred or deduced rather than felt by intuition

A fi nal point to note is that in actual speech indirect reports are not made in the impoverished climate in which they appear in linguistic examples Th ey are made in climates that are rich in context and that are rich with confl icting and supporting contextual signals Pottsrsquo examples assume no mdash or relatively little mdash context and accompanying intonation As a result only a limited picture of the interactions of speaker-oriented meaning can be had there Th e examples I have presented here are only slightly less limited in context and accompanying intonation but even this limited addition shows that claims of speaker-orientedness must be far more fi nely grained than a generalisation that all NCI content must be speaker-oriented

38 Potts attributes this example to Kratzer ( 1999 ) 39 Also note that in this example like (46) above the expressive is in object position in which expressive terms generally seem to be less strongly speaker-oriented Similarly if we alter this example slightly rendering the expressive terms indefi nite it becomes much less likely to be oriented to the speaker (i) My father screamed that he would never allow me to marry some bastard Yankee In any case the verb of reporting here screamed that injects additional attitude and emotion into the scenario that is not present in most of Pottsrsquo examples as he relies on the unmarked said that for his indirect reports Th is would seem to concur with my argument that the speaker-orientedness of the indirect report is heavily infl uenced by attitudinal information

I want to provide one last kind of counterexample to Pottsrsquo requirement Th is one is interesting as it approaches the problem of speaker attributes from the opposite direction Here the speaker of an indirect report does embellish the original statement with an expressive and the person whose speech is being reported then feels obligated to object to the embellishment mdash clearly feeling that she is being given unwanted credit for the expressive abuse of the person in question in this case a child

(47) Context Mary and John are talking about a big scratch on Maryrsquos new car which was caused by a kid running into the parked car with his tri-cycle Mary is clearly upset about it Bob walks up then and joins the conversation John turns to Bob and says

So Mary was just saying that this asshole kid hit her car with his tricycle [But Mary protests]

Wait a minute I didnrsquot say he was an asshole Hersquos only three years old

If the expressive content of this asshole kid were actually identifi ed with the speaker of the indirect report (ie John) as Potts would have it it seems unlikely that Mary would feel the need to distance herself from it On the contrary though Mary clearly feels as if the expressive has been attributed to her the person whose speech is being reported

Taken together these many examples are troubling for Pottsrsquo requirement that NCIs be speaker-oriented Now in more recent work Potts ( 2007c ) does address some expressive uses in which expressives can be oriented to a perspec-tive other than that of the speaker However according to Potts these are marked occurrences Consider (48) [Potts ( 2007c ) ex (15)] 38 the expressive content of bastard can be associated with the speakerrsquos father rather than the speaker However it is by no means obvious that it must be associated with the father We can easily associate it with the speaker herself for instance she might have become angry with Webster since the time of her fatherrsquos utterance 39

40 See Potts ( 2007c sect23) for much more detail on this arrangement and on Lasersohnrsquos (2005) contextual judge 41 Pottsrsquo perspective dependence here is foreshadowed by Fillmorersquos (1982) notion of perspec-tival shift 42 See Potts ( 2005 213)

(48) My father screamed that he would never allow me to marry that bastard Webster

To account for this Potts appeals to the possibility of a contextual judge from whose perspective the utterance is reported similar to Lasersohn ( 2005 ) Potts can then account for what he calls perspective dependence of expressives by including the judge argument as a part of their denotation 40 Potts ( 2007c ) defi nes perspective dependence as

Perspective dependence Expressive content is evaluated from a particular perspec-tive In general the perspective is the speakerrsquos but there can be deviations if conditions are right 41

Potts suggests that generally the speaker and the judge are the same person but that there can be exceptions ldquoit appears to be a marked option to evaluate expressions with a judge who is not also the speaker but we need to allow for the possibilityrdquo (2007c 10) So Potts allows for non-speaker-oriented expres-sives but attempts to minimise the frequency of their occurrence I would argue that they are much less restricted than Potts suggests and that their interpreta-tion in indirect reports is highly dependent on factors like intonation pitch and mood factors that are present in every natural language utterance but which are missing from almost every isolated sentence in linguistic examples

In any case while the introduction of the contextual judge may provide a more tidy theoretical account of the expressive data it seems to me to greatly reduce the overall impact of Pottsrsquo proposal for NCIs to something like this sometimes the NCI data is oriented to the speaker and sometimes it is not Further what do we say about the parenthetical NCIs as in (41) and (42) above Would we need to somehow embed a judge argument in the paren-thetical cases as well

I think that Pottsrsquo contribution of the speaker-oriented requirement to Gricersquos conception of conventional implicature raises some interesting ques-tions as well as grouping together an impressive amount of data But it does not do so for free For Potts this is the key ingredient for excluding Gricersquos traditional CI data such as but from the NCI class of meaning 42 Yet if there are problems with the notion of speaker-orientedness are we justifi ed in maintaining that but and Gricersquos other original data can be excluded on the basis of it I argue that we cannot

53 NCIs and Presuppositions Again

Th e uncertainty of the speaker-oriented requirement leads us to a more basic question Th is regards the initial distinction Potts makes between NCIs and presuppositions Recall the primary basis of this distinction is that presuppo-sitions are generally not allowed to project out of the complement of attitude verbs ie they are plugged Potts suggests NCIs on the other hand routinely project out of such presupposition plugs Th us he concludes they must be distinct kinds of meaning In the examples considered below however it is not clear that this generalisation holds in the way Potts describes Taken with the defeasibility of expressives we saw above in sect521 this has the eff ect of blur-ring the distinction between presupposition and the data Potts considers to be NCIs or at least questioning the diagnostics used to make the distinction

In the section that follows I will consider two of the diagnostics Potts uses to make his distinction Th e fi rst is the requirement that NCIs project out of presupposition plugs Th e second is Pottsrsquo requirement that NCIs are anti-backgrounding As this latter requirement warrants only brief discussion we can start with it and then return to the question of projection in the following section

531 NCIs and Antibackgrounding In Pottsrsquo framework information contributed by NCIs must be ldquodiscourse newrdquo However according to Potts presuppositions are normally backgrounded and can thus be distinguished from his NCIs on these grounds In Pottsrsquo words (2007b) an NCI will be redundant ldquoif the speaker fi rst commits to a proposition p and then goes on to express p again as a [N]CIrdquo Th is can be illustrated briefl y in (49) [Potts ( 2007b ) ex (9)]

(49) Lance is a cyclist Lance the cyclist battled cancer 43

Th e information that Lance is a cyclist is already entailed by the common ground at the time in which the NCI the cyclist is contributed As such Potts argues it should be infelicitous due to redundancy

But now consider the following example in which the common ground similarly entails the content contributed by the appositive but the appositive is perfectly felicitous In (50) the speaker is committed to the proposition that

43 Th ere is more wrong with this sequence than simply the redundant information in the appositive Th e repeated use of the full proper name Lance in the second sentence is odd too In a natural discourse one would expect an unaccented pronoun See the indented quote below from Lambrecht ( 1994 ) on topical referents and unaccented pronouns

Dale Jr is a cyclist yet the following sentence in which this information is affi rmed again in an appositive is not redundant

(50) Dale Jr is a cyclist Dale Sr is a race car driver Dale Jr the cyclist lives in Arkansas

In the last sentence in (50) the fact that Dale Jr is a cyclist is clearly known and redundant information However with the introduction of Dale Sr into the discourse there is a potential for confusion Th us the appositive is felicitous here in its use of disambiguation or contrast So the question is not really about what information is already known and what the speaker is committed to Rather the question is about what information is activated a distinction that can be described in terms of Chafersquos (1987) and Lambrechtrsquos (1994) notion of activation

We can compare this to the use of pronouns in discourse If a referent is completely activated in a discourse that referent can be referred to with an unaccented pronoun If there is a potential for pronoun reference to be ambig-uous then the intended referent is probably not fully activated or at the centre of discourse Consider Lambrechtrsquos (1994 94) description

it is possible for example to use the unaccented pronoun she to refer to a particu-lar female referent only as long as that referent is the current center of the atten-tion of the speech participants [hellip] Once the attention of the speech participants has shifted to another item it is no longer felicitous to use that pronoun to refer to that person

We can easily show that the information in Pottsrsquo examples can be character-ised in this same way that is the supplements can be both previously known and discourse-new Th ere is no problem with redundancy unless the content of the supplements is previously known and activated Whether or not the information is part of the common ground or is novel is irrelevant

Th us antibackgrounding does not distinguish between NCIs and presup-positions as clearly as Potts would have us believe In examples like (50) the supplement does not contribute discourse-new information and neither is it redundant as Potts would predict In the next section I consider the projec-tion question with similar results

532 NCIs Unplugged Potts argues that NCIs routinely project out of attitude complements In this way they diff er from presuppositions Th us in (51) [Potts ( 2007b ) ex (11)] the presupposed information that Sam owns a kangaroo does not project out of the complement (ie it is plugged) and so the speaker is able to deny that Sam owns a kangaroo

(51) Sue believes that Samrsquos kangaroo is sick but thatrsquos ridiculousmdashSam doesnrsquot own a kangaroo

Now compare that with an NCI such as a nominal appositive in (52) [Potts ( 2007b ) ex (12)]

Unlike the presupposition in (51) the NCI content a confi rmed psychopath in (52) does not project out of the attitude complement As such the speaker cannot deny its content without contradicting herself Th us Potts suggests that a distinction should be drawn here between the presupposition and the NCI as diff erent kinds of meaning

But now consider (53a) in which the parenthetical Dirty Harry himself does not project out of the attitude complement or (53b) in which the indefi nite paren-thetical a big dog can easily be denied by the speaker without contradiction

(53) a JOHN believes that some pissed-off cop Dirty Harry himself came out and wrote him a parking ticket last night It was really his cousin Tony though playing a joke on him with a fake ticket

b Bobby believes that a dog a big dog was chasing him down the street It was actually tiny though like a Chihuahua

Under Pottsrsquo generalisation the speaker of a belief report is committed to the information contained in a parenthetical in that report For Potts this explains why attempted cancellations of the parenthetical information in examples like (52) above appear to be contradictory However in (53) the cancellations of the parentheticals are perfectly acceptable Th us the parentheticals in (53) pattern closer to presuppositions under a plug than to an NCI Th is is prob-lematic for Pottsrsquo distinction

Letrsquos look now at the way some expressives behave under a similar presup-position plug According to Potts expressive content which is embedded in an attitude report should be unevaluable apart from the main utterance In other words much like the supplement in (52) the embedded expressive content should be identifi ed with the speaker of the matrix utterance Consider (54) [Potts (2006) ex (10)] which contains the adjectival expressive bastard embed-ded under believe

(54) Sue believes that that bastard Kresge should be fi red (I think hersquos a good guy)

It is quite clear that the expressive content of adjectival bastard is not plugged under believe and thus identifi es with the speaker of the matrix utterance

According to Potts this points to a distinction between NCIs and presup-positions

But we can alter (54) minimally trading a non-expressive adjective for the expressive one and fi nd that we get the same results Th e cancellation of the non-expressive (55) sounds just as odd as the cancelled expressive content in (54) with the non-expressive content of red projecting in the same way

(55) Sue believes that that red carpet should go in the dining room (I think itrsquos blue)

Th e strong readings in (54) and (55) undoubtedly have something to do with the defi niteness of the demonstrative that which suggests that the speaker has a close and direct contact with the object in question If we weaken the second that to an indefi nite as in (56) below it is much easier to associate the expres-sive content with the subject of the belief report as opposed to the speaker of the report Here the expressive content of a big-ass dog seems to be plugged under believe Accordingly it is unproblematic for the speaker to assert her own opposite beliefs about the size of the dog without contradicting herself

(56) John believes that a big-ass dog was chasing him down the street Th e dog wasnrsquot actually big though It just had a really deep voice 44

In contrast the demonstrative-marked NP in (57) and the expressive content are not plugged under believe and it is much easier for the speaker of the report to seem as if she contradicts herself as Potts would predict

(57) John believes that that big-ass dog was chasing him down the street Th e dog wasnrsquot actually big though

Pace Potts then the indefi nite-marked expressive content does seem to be plugged under the attitude verb much as it would be if it were presupposi-tional Th e pair in (58a-b) illustrate the same with adjectival asshole

(58) a Angel believes that some asshole cop was out there writing him a ticket I think that cop is pretty cool though He let me off last week when he caught me stealing hubcaps

b Angel believes that that asshole cop was out there writing him a ticket I think that cop is pretty cool though

44 Note that the same eff ect holds when the expressive content is indicated through stress or pronunciation of the adjective as well

(i) John believes that a biiiiiiiiggg dog was chasing him down the street Th e dog wasnrsquot actually big though It just had a really deep voice

Th us there is more to the question here than just Pottsrsquo claim that expressive content projects past presupposition plugs as there is a marked diff erence in performance here between defi nite and indefi nite NPs And all of the expres-sive data Potts ( 2007c ) uses to illustrate the distinction between presupposi-tion and NCIs occur within defi nite-marked NPs mdash mostly with demonstrative that

Potts notes additionally that tense operators can plug presuppositions but that expressive content is never interpreted in the scope of tense operators Th us in (59) according to Potts it cannot be that the speaker dislikes Kresge only in the past and this accounts for the contradiction in the sentence in parentheses [(2007c) ex (13)]

(59) Th at bastard Kresge was late for work yesterday (But hersquos no bastard today because today he was on time)

However consider (60) with the expressive dumbass Here it seems fairly clear that the speaker thinks of John as a dumbass only in the past Th ere is no contradiction in the follow-up sentences in which the speaker asserts that John went on to be very smart

(60) John was this dumbass guy in high school but he ended up being super smart in college He got an awesome job when he graduated Hersquos the smartest guy I know now

Another problem with Pottsrsquo use of the diagnostic in (59) is that it seems to return the same results whether the adjectives in question are expressive or not Consider (61a-b) in which the relevant adjectives are non-expressive and in which the attempted denials seem contradictory in the same way as Pottsrsquo expressive example in (59)

(61) a Th at kind man rescued a kitten from a tree yesterday (But hersquos not kind today because he stepped on my toe when he passed by me)

b Th at tall man rescued a kitten from a tree yesterday (But hersquos not tall today because now hersquos standing next to Shaq)

Th us it is not clear how useful this diagnostic is for Pottsrsquo purposes To sum up the supplement and expressive data Potts considers do not per-

form uniformly in the tests he proposes to distinguish NCIs from presupposi-tion Th at is it isnrsquot clear that NCIs are redundant if they convey information already entailed by the common ground and it isnrsquot clear that they are re -quired to project out of complements of attitude verbs One possible result here might be that some NCIs and presuppositions do not compose distinct classes Th e importance of discourse contexts and background assumptions in

counter-exemplifying Pottsrsquo claims might in fact lead us in this direction Similarly the constancy of many parentheticals and expressives under nega-tion would also support this possibility

Another possibility might be simply that Pottsrsquo diagnostics themselves are imperfect and so inconclusive Either way this raises rather serious problems for Pottsrsquo distinction between presupposition and the NCIs and so for his claim of the NCIs as a distinguished class of meaning

In the fi nal section we return to an account of the DSS as a traditional Gricean conventional implicature

6 Conclusion Th e DSS and Gricean Conventional Implicature

A common function of Gricean conventional implicature is to assist the hearer in apprehending a given proposition while at the same time not mak-ing a truth-conditional contribution to that proposition Th e proposition in question might follow from some previous aspect of the discourse or it might contrast with it or it might hold any number of other relations to previous discourse or to attitudes and beliefs of the speaker Conven tional implicature devices are one means of marking or emphasising such relations It seems quite clear that double-subject sentences fi t this description

Th e initial NP of a DSS does not touch the truth or falsity of what is said it merely aids the hearer in its correct apprehension 45 Th us if NP1 is stripped away from a DSS all other things being equal the truth or falsity of the main proposition does not change it is however likely to be diffi cult to apprehend and so infelicitous in context

Consider example (62) Th e initial NP o apartamento lsquothe apartmentrsquo is meant to help Gradinho correctly apprehend the location of the beer bottles If o apar-tamento were not part of the utterance the speakerrsquos claim would still hold for her own person she would grasp the proposition she had conveyed However it would not be clear to the hearer who would need some way of determining whether it was Carlosrsquo car or Th omasrsquo apartment that was littered with beer bottles It is worth emphasising in this example the distinction between the strong sense of activation I refer to above in sect531 and the disambiguation that is occurring here with Mariarsquos DSS Clearly Th omasrsquo new apartment is somewhat activated in the discourse as it has been referred to pronominally

45 Th e language of this sentence and the following paragraph sounds very much like Frege and his description of similar kinds of meaning See Frege (1918) Th is is intentional Horn ( 2007 ) argues convincingly that Frege preceded Grice by several decades in describing the CI class of meaning Horn refers to these Fregean CIs as ldquoF-implicaturesrdquo

two diff erent times as laacute lsquotherersquo However between the time of these pronominal references and Mariarsquos fi nal two sentences she has invoked a second location namely Carlosrsquo car outside in the parking lot Th us the location ldquothe apart-mentrdquo is now slightly less activated while still being accessible Th e DSS is then used to reorient the topic of discussion back to the apartment

(62) Gradinho Vocecirc jaacute esteve no apartamento novo do Tomas Ouvi dizer que eacute legal

Maria Jaacute Eu estava laacute noite passada O Carlos e o Joatildeo estavam laacute tambeacutem bebendo cerveja Carlos fi cou tentando me fazer beber mas eu disse que ele podia esquecer Eu sentei com ele no carro um pouco porque eu senti pena dele

O apartamento as garrafas de cerveja estavam por toda a parte O Tomas estava bem puto da vida por isso

Grady Have you been to Th omasrsquo new apartment I heard it was nice

Mary Yeah I was there last night Carlos and John were there too drinking beer Carlos kept trying to make me drink but I told him to forget it I sat out in his car with him though for a little while because I felt sorry for him

Th e apartment beer bottles were everywhere Th omas wasnrsquot happy about it

Th e same description holds true in the following example of a DSS When Tom utters NP1 um cachorro lsquoa dogrsquo it prepares the hearer for the root utterance

(63) Bob Vocecirc durmiu bem ontem a noite Tom Natildeo muito bem Um cachorro o latido natildeo me deixou dormir Bob How did you sleep last night Tom Not good A dog the barking kept me up all night long

As with the previous example the truth or falsity of the fi nal proposition would not change in the absence of NP1 Its utterance might be infelicitous in context to the hearer however and so diffi cult to apprehend but it would not alter in truth or falsity to the speaker

When viewed this way it is straightforward to consider NP1 as contributing a conventional implicature ie a kind of meaning that has consequences for the apprehension of a proposition but which does not aff ect the semantic content of that proposition NP1 acts as a sort of thematic connective which connects the primary utterance of the DSS with some aspect of the context that is accessible in the sense of Chafe ( 1987 ) and Lambrecht ( 1994 )

46 For Bach these are of course not conventional implicatures

It might thus be considered a set of instructions to the hearer on how to interpret the primary utterance and in this sense it is comparable to other discourse particles which similarly relate utterances and context For instance utterance-initial but and therefore place the respective utterances that follow them in certain relations to prior discourse but marks a contrast with some aspect of context and therefore marks a conclusion or a result of preceding utterances Th e crucial diff erence with NP1 is that its instruction is to return to an accessible aspect of context So a better comparison here would be between NP1 and utterance-initial anyway which Levinson ( 1983 85) describes as ldquoindicat[ing] that the utterance that contains it is not addressed to the immediately preceding discourse but to one or more steps backrdquo A fur-ther comparison can be made between NP1 and the utterance modifi ers that Bach ( 1999a 356) refers to as topicals which include such phrases as to change the subject to digress for a moment to get back to the subject and so on 46 Bach suggests that the topical is ldquoused to perform a second-order act of commenting on the main utterancerdquo Th at is the topicals themselves do not change the subject this is accomplished by the main utterance Th e topical merely indi-cates that the change is coming and the same is true of utterance-initial any-way So there is an important contrast here with NP1 which itself changes the subject We can think of NP1 as bearing the topic-changing qualities of utterance-initial anyway along with the descriptive information that desig-nates the result of the change

Recall the following fragment of (62) Th e NP1 o apartamento signals that a shift is occurring in the event setting and it identifi es the shift in interest from the car back to the apartment Th e primary utterance as garrafas de cerveja estavam por toda a parte can then be made unambiguously

Eu sentei com ele no carro um pouco porque eu senti pena dele O aparta-mento as garrafas de cerveja estavam por toda a parte

I sat out in his car with him though for a little while because I felt sorry for him Th e apartment beer bottles were everywhere

What we have then is a conventionalised means of identifying and return-ing to a previous discourse context

At this point it will be useful to return to the Gricean characteristics of con-ventional implicature We generally take CIs to be non-truth conditional non-calculable non-cancellable and detachable Th e DSS can easily be shown to exhibit all of these qualities

It is clear that NP1 contributes non-truth conditional content to the primary utterance of the DSS In (62) above the primary utterance of the DSS is true for the speaker regardless of whether NP1 is present or not In NP1rsquos absence however the primary utterance might be infelicitous for the hearer Similarly it makes no sense to speak of NP1rsquos contribution in terms of calculability from pragmatic principles as we would with standard conversational implicatures We also saw above in (17) that NP1 is non-cancellable the content of NP1 is conventional and the speaker (if speaking seriously) is committed to it Finally it is quite clear that the CI content of the DSS is detachable that is it will not necessarily be conveyed by diff erent propositions that are truth-conditionally equal Consider a commonly invoked CI device such as even 47 as described in Ward and Hirschberg ( 1985 86) ldquo[64b] does not convey the implicature con-veyed by [64a] namely that John was an unlikely person to leaverdquo

(64) a Even John left b John left

Th e situation with the DSS is similar If the NP1 of (62) is absent the primary utterance as garrafas de cerveja estavam por toda a parte maintains the same truth conditions for the speaker however the link to the relevant framing context is not conveyed Th is might result in a primary utterance that is infe-licitous for the hearer but it doesnrsquot necessarily result in one that is truth-conditionally diff erent

To conclude the DSS makes a good case study and motivation for return-ing to Gricersquos system as it can be given an account in terms of Gricean con-ventional implicature quite straightforwardly We also saw above how it could be considered in terms of a Pottsian NCI as well and that the only one of Pottsrsquo criteria to give that analysis any pause is that of speaker-orientedness Inter -estingly Pottsrsquo speaker-oriented requirement cannot be maintained upon close empirical investigation and Pottsrsquo system without this feature leaves us at approximately the same place that Grice did Th at is Pottsrsquo primary criticism of Gricersquos data like but and therefore was that they are not speaker-oriented but we have seen that speaker-orientedness cannot hold up as a criticism of Grice and that it is in itself a kind of Achillesrsquo heel for Pottsrsquo otherwise very impres-sive framework

Further investigation is clearly needed in sorting out the relations between many of Pottsrsquo NCIs and presupposition Similarly there is much room for psycholinguistic investigation of pitch and intonation and the manner in which they interact with speaker-orientedness or aff ect in reported speech

47 Even would not be an NCI device for Potts

Acknowledgments

Many thanks are due to Larry Horn Scott Schwenter and Gregory Ward for valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper It goes without saying that any shortcomings herein should in no way refl ect upon them Th anks also to audiences at University of California Berkeley University of Texas at Austin University of British Columbia Vancouver and Yale University where parts of this paper have been presented

References

Amaral Patricia Craig Roberts and E Allyn Smith 2007 Review of Th e Logic of Conventional Implicature ( 2005 ) by Chris Potts Linguistics and Philosophy 30 707-749

Azevedo Milton 2005 Portuguese A Linguistic Introduction Cambridge Cambridge University Press Bach Kent 1999a Th e myth of conventional implicature Linguistics and Philosophy 22

327 - 366 Bach Kent 1999b Th e semantics-pragmatics distinction what it is and why it matters

In K Turner (ed) Th e SemanticsPragmatics Interface from Diff erent Points of View 65 - 83 Oxford Elsevier

Bach Kent 2006 Th e top 10 misconceptions about implicature In B Birner and G Ward (eds) Drawing the Boundaries of Meaning Neo-Gricean Studies in Pragmatics and Semantics in Honor of Laurence R Horn 21-30 Amsterdam Benjamins

Bakhtin Mikhail 1981 Discourse in the novel In M Holquist (ed) Th e Dialogic Imagination Four Essays 259 - 422 Austin University of Texas Press

Banfi eld Ann 1982 Unspeakable Sentences Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction Boston Routledge

Bellert Irena 1977 On semantic and distributional properties of sentential adverbs Linguis tic Inquiry 8 337 - 351

Birner Betty and Gregory Ward 1998 Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English Amsterdam John Benjamins

Black Elizabeth 2006 Pragmatic Stylistics Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press Bolinger Dwight 1989 Intonation and Its Uses Melody in Grammar and Discourse Stanford

CA Stanford University Press Chafe Wallace 1987 Cognitive constraints on information fl ow In R Tomlin (ed) Coherence

and Grounding in Discourse 21 - 52 Amsterdam John Benjamins Chierchia Gennaro and Sally McConnell-Ginet 2000 Meaning and Grammar 2nd ed

Cambridge MA MIT Press Cole Peter and Jerry Morgan (eds) 1975 Syntax and Semantics Speech Acts Vol 3 New York

Academic Press Cruse Alan 1986 Lexical Semantics Cambridge Cambridge University Press Cruse Alan 2004 Meaning in Language Oxford Oxford University Press Culicover Peter 1992 English tag questions and universal grammar Lingua 88 21 - 54 Emonds Joseph 1976 A Transformational Approach to English Syntax New York Academic-

Press Fillmore Charles 1982 Toward a descriptive framework for spatial deixis In J Jarvella and

W Klein (eds) Speech Place and Action 31-59 London J Wiley and Sons

von Fintel Kai 2006 What is presupposition accommodation again Ms MIT lthttpmitedufi ntelwwwaccommodation-againpdfgt Accessed November 1 2007

Frege Gottlob 1948 Sense and reference Th e Philosophical Review 57 209 - 230 Originally published as ldquoUumlber Sinn und Bedeutungrdquo in Zeitschrift fuumlr Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 100 (1892) 25-50

Frege Gottlob 1956 Th e thought a logical inquiry Mind 55 289 - 311 Originally published as ldquoDer Gedankerdquo in Beitraumlge zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus 1 (1918-9) 58-77

Grice Paul 1961 Th e causal theory of perception Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Vol 35 121 - 52

Grice Paul 1975 Logic and conversation In P Cole and J Morgan (eds) 41 - 58 Grice Paul 1989 Studies in the Way of Words Cambridge MA Harvard University Press Gundel Jeanette Nancy Hedberg and Ron Zacharski 1993 Cognitive status and the form of

referring expressions in discourse Language 69 274 - 307 Horn Laurence 1991 Given as new when redundant information isnrsquot Journal of Pragmatics

15 313 - 336 Horn Laurence 2002 Assertoric inertia and NPI licensing Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistics

Society 382 55 - 82 Horn Laurence 2007 Toward a Fregean pragmatics Voraussetzung Nebegedanke Andeutung

In I Kecskes and L Horn (eds) Explorations in Pragmatics Linguistic Cognitive and Intercultural Aspects 39-69 New York Mouton

Huang Yan 2007 Pragmatics Oxford Oxford University Press Israel Michael 1996 Polarity sensitivity as lexical semantics Linguistics and Philosophy 19

619 - 666 Jackendoff Ray 1972 Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar Cambridge MA MIT

Press Jespersen Otto 1924 Th e Philosophy of Grammar New York Henry Holt Jespersen Otto 1931 A Modern English Grammar Part IV Syntax Heidelberg Carl Winters Kay Paul 2004 Pragmatic aspects of grammatical constructions In L Horn and G Ward

(eds) Th e Handbook of Pragmatics 675 - 700 Malden MA Blackwell Karttunen Lauri and Stanley Peters 1979 Conventional implicature In C Oh and D Dinneen

(eds) Syntax and Semantics 11 Presupposition 1 - 56 New York Academic Press Kratzer Angelika 1999 Beyond ouch and oops how descriptive and expressive meaning interact

A Comment on David Kaplanrsquos Paper Cornell Conference on Th eories of Context Dependency lthttpsemanticsarchivenetArchiveWEwNGUyOgt Accessed July 20 2009

Kuong Io-Kei Joaquim and Meacutercia Flannery 2006 Frame-setting topic and the left periphery Southern Journal of Linguistics 27 83 - 96

Ladusaw William 1983 Logical form and conditions on grammaticality Linguistics and Philosophy 6 373 - 392

Lambrecht Knud 1994 Information Structure and Sentence Form Topic Focus and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents Cambridge Cambridge University Press

Lasersohn Peter 2005 Context dependence disagreement and predicates of personal taste Linguistics and Philosophy 28 643 - 686

Levinson Stephen 1983 Pragmatics Cambridge Cambridge University Press Li Charles and Sandra Th ompson 1976 Subject and topic a new typology of language

In C Li (ed) Subject and Topic 457 - 489 New York Academic Press Mey Jacob 2001 Pragmatics An Introduction 2nd ed Malden MA Blackwell Morzycki Marcin 2008 Nonrestrictive modifi ers in nonparenthetical positions In L McNally

and C Kennedy (eds) Adjectives and Adverbs Syntax Semantics and Discourse 101 - 122 Oxford Oxford University Press

Perini Maacuterio 2002 Modern Portuguese A Reference Grammar New Haven Yale University Press

Pontes Eunice 1987 O Toacutepico no Portuguecircs do Brasil Campinas SP Pontes Potts Christopher 2005 Th e Logic of Conventional Implicatures Oxford Oxford University

Press Potts Christopher 2007a Conventional implicatures a distinguished class of meanings In

GRamchand and C Reiss (eds) Th e Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces 475 - 501 Oxford Oxford University Press

Potts Christopher 2007b Into the conventional-implicature dimension Philosophy Compass 4 665 - 679

Potts Christopher 2007c Th e expressive dimension Th eoretical Linguistics 33 165 - 197 Ross John Robert 1967 Constraints on Variables in Syntax PhD dissertation MIT Ross John R 1973 Slifting In M Halle M Gross and M Schutzenberger (eds) Th e Formal

Analysis of Natural Languages 133 - 179 New York Mouton Salmon William forthcoming Double subjects and verbal demonstrations Journal of

Pragmatics Siegel Muff y 2002 Like the discourse particle and semantics Journal of Semantics 19 35 - 71 Strawson Peter 1950 On referring Mind 59 320 - 344 Th orne James 1972 On nonrestrictive relative clauses Linguistic Inquiry 3 552 - 556 Tucker Marion 1939 Public Speaking for Technical Men New York McGraw-Hill Ward Gregory and Julia Hirschberg 1985 Implicating uncertainty the pragmatics of fall-rise

intonation Language 61 747 - 776 Ward Gregory and Betty Birner 1995 Defi niteness and the English existential Language

71 722 - 742 Wilkins David 1995 Expanding the traditional category of deictic elements interjections

as deictics In J Duchan et al (eds) Deictics in Narrative A Cognitive Science Perspective 359 - 386 Hillsdale Lawrence Erlbaum Associates

lectures at Harvard in 1967 2 Gricersquos conventional implicature has been refor-mulated recently in several publications by Chris Potts ( 2005 2007a -c) I argue in the present paper that Pottsrsquo reformulation is fl awed in important ways however and I show that the DSS provides a useful test case in discrimi-nating between the two competing CI approaches

Potts requires his CIs to be speaker-oriented in indirect speech reports but it is diffi cult to illustrate this requirement for the DSS as the DSS is a main-clause phenomenon and cannot be reported in indirect speech However this requirement is an innovation on Pottsrsquo part it does not appear in Gricersquos origi-nal conception of conventional implicature and it is ultimately the distin-guishing factor between Pottsrsquo CIs and those Grice originally described To complicate matters for Potts this criterion seems to be empirically unsustain-able for Pottsrsquo own data and so Potts runs into problems in distinguishing between the two views of conventional implicature

I show ultimately that it is straightforward to provide a CI treatment of the DSS in Gricersquos original terms and I also suggest that some of Pottsrsquo conven-tional implicatures might be better thought of as species of presuppositions Before turning to conventional implicature however it is necessary to fi rst consider some empirical facts about the DSS

11 Th e DSS in Previous Literature

Th e sentences that I am referring to as DSS in Brazilian Portuguese have been mentioned occasionally in the linguistics literature over the last several years For example Pontes ( 1987 ) argues that the frequency of such sentences in Brazilian Portuguese is evidence that BPV should be considered a topic-prominent language as in the typology of Li and Th ompson ( 1976 ) Similarly the reference grammars of Perini ( 2002 ) and Azevedo ( 2005 ) list a few exam-ples of the DSS and note the frequency of the sentence type in the language Kuong and Flannery ( 2006 ) present a syntactic account of the construction and argue for its value in redefi ning the left periphery Th e account of the basic DSS grammar that follows in sect12 below is based on Kuong and Flanneryrsquos description with a few innovations which are laid out in more detail in Salmon (forthcoming) Crucially none of the abovementioned works con-sider the DSS in terms of conventional implicature

2 ldquoLogic and conversationrdquo the lecture in which Grice discusses conventional implicature appeared in Cole and Morgan ( 1975 ) However all of the lectures were widely circulated in manuscript form from 1967 forward Th ey were collected and published together in Grice ( 1989 ) which is the source of citation for the present essay

12 Th e DSS Grammar

a former spy

33 Comma Intonation

(i) _____ ___________________

being open

tonight

dinner tonight 33

to work

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Acknowledgments

References

12 Th e DSS Grammar

a former spy

33 Comma Intonation

(i) _____ ___________________

being open

tonight

dinner tonight 33

to work

ing jerk Bob What

Acknowledgments

References

a former spy

33 Comma Intonation

(i) _____ ___________________

being open

tonight

dinner tonight 33

to work

ing jerk Bob What

Acknowledgments

References

a former spy

33 Comma Intonation

(i) _____ ___________________

being open

tonight

dinner tonight 33

to work

ing jerk Bob What

Acknowledgments

References

a former spy

33 Comma Intonation

(i) _____ ___________________

being open

tonight

dinner tonight 33

to work

ing jerk Bob What

Acknowledgments

References

a former spy

33 Comma Intonation

(i) _____ ___________________

being open

tonight

dinner tonight 33

to work

ing jerk Bob What

Acknowledgments

References

33 Comma Intonation

(i) _____ ___________________

being open

tonight

dinner tonight 33

to work

ing jerk Bob What

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References

33 Comma Intonation

(i) _____ ___________________

being open

tonight

dinner tonight 33

to work

ing jerk Bob What

Acknowledgments

References

33 Comma Intonation

(i) _____ ___________________

being open

tonight

dinner tonight 33

to work

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References

33 Comma Intonation

(i) _____ ___________________

being open

tonight

dinner tonight 33

to work

ing jerk Bob What

Acknowledgments

References

(i) _____ ___________________

being open

tonight

dinner tonight 33

to work

ing jerk Bob What

Acknowledgments

References

being open

tonight

dinner tonight 33

to work

ing jerk Bob What

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References

being open

tonight

dinner tonight 33

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References

being open

tonight

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tonight

dinner tonight 33

to work

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References

being open

tonight

dinner tonight 33

to work

ing jerk Bob What

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References

being open

tonight

dinner tonight 33

to work

ing jerk Bob What

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References

being open

tonight

dinner tonight 33

to work

ing jerk Bob What

Acknowledgments

References

being open

tonight

dinner tonight 33

to work

ing jerk Bob What

Acknowledgments

References

tonight

dinner tonight 33

to work

ing jerk Bob What

Acknowledgments

References

tonight

dinner tonight 33

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ing jerk Bob What

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References

tonight

dinner tonight 33

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ing jerk Bob What

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References

tonight

dinner tonight 33

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tonight

dinner tonight 33

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References

tonight

dinner tonight 33

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References

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dinner tonight 33

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