Don’t miss an exciting talk by Bart Geurts tonight at 7 pm in the Peterlin Pavilion.
Bart Geurts (Department of Philosophy, University of Nijmegen)
Date: Tuesday, 9th August @ 7 pm, Peterlin Pavilion
Title: Quantity implicatures: a tendentious survey
Abstract: The paradigm example of a quantity implicature is the inference from “some” to “not all”, as in:
Some bankers are crooks ~> Not all bankers are crooks.
In recent years, quantity implicatures have received a lot of attention not only from philosophers and linguists, but from experimentalists, too, and the number of theoretical analyses has increased in proportion. In this talk, I will give an overview of the main strands that have emerged from all this research, with special emphasis on the issue of “embedded implicatures”. I will argue that the extant data still favour the classical analysis inspired by the work of Grice, but I will also show that the Gricean framework will have to be extended so as to account for phenomena below the sentence level.
