Research

Embedded Gricean Pragmatics

My dissertation "Embedded Gricean Pragmatics: It Exists!" (successfully defended on June 10) addresses the problem of embedded implicature, which has led many researchers to conclude that at least some implicatures are derived by covert operators rather than pragmatic reasoning.  My work moves us closer to resolving this debate by clarifying both what a theory of embedded implicature needs to explain and also what a pragmatic account of those facts would look like.

In the first part of the dissertation, I propose a formal system for calculating and composing embedded implicatures, in which the pragmatics accesses subsentential denotations by picking values for free variables, as with related phenomena such as domain restriction.  By default, the pragmatics obeys a Faithfulness constraint, but it will perform nontrivial local enrichments when (as initially proposed by Simons 2010, 2011, 2014, 2017) doing so prevents what would otherwise be an utterance-level Maxim violation.  The broader takeaway of this part is that the mere existence of embedded implicature is not a problem, and that adjudicating between semantic and pragmatic approaches will involve checking which provides a better explanation for the distribution of these readings in discourse.

The second half of the dissertation examines the distribution of scalar implicatures in downward-entailing environments (DE SI's), which I suggest are the cases that would show the Gricean approach to be wrong, if it is indeed wrong.  Some results in this section are potentially good news for the pragmatic approach.  For instance, while one might have worried that DE SI readings result in weaker truth conditions, thus causing a Quantity violation where there wasn't one before, they are in fact only felicitous when "restrengthened" with a matrix-level scalar or ignorance implicature.  However, the main result is a new puzzle for all approaches–– DE SI readings have the licensing conditions one would expect from local accommodation of a presupposition concerning the exhaustive proposition's relevance whereas their truth-conditions would require accommodating a presupposition about its truth.  Despite obvious resonance with the Pex approach (Bassi et al. 2021), no existing account predicts this licensing condition.  [Slides!]

Epistemic modals and semantic parentheticals

This project addressed the classic puzzle of whether epistemic necessity modals are strong–– for instance, whether English “must P” entails “P”.  My main empirical observation was that that all of the discourse behaviors taken as evidence of a strong “must” are also displayed by expressions such as “I guess” and “I suppose” for which neither a lexical nor compositional account would be tenable.  Thus I concluded that we independently need pragmatic principles allowing semantically weak embedding predicates to act as pragmatically strong, and proposed an account on which this strengthening is triggered as an instance of Roothian implicational bridging.  [Paper!]