Pragmatic Inferences Related to Logical Terms

Paul Grice was concerned with the way logical terms such as some, or and and take on extralogical meanings in conversational contexts. To take one example, Grice (1989) described or as having a weak word meaning identical to formal logic’s inclusive disjunction (which is false only in the case where both disjuncts are) but as conveying in conversation a speaker’s stronger meaning corresponding to the exclusive disjunction (which is false in the case where both disjuncts are false and where both are true). Grice used the term implicature to describe the pragmatic inference linking word meanings to speaker’s meanings and laid the foundations for nearly all of the linguistic-pragmatic studies found in this volume.1

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