In your dreams: Flouting Quality II

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ScienceDirect Journal of Pragmatics 87 (2015) 64--79 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

In your dreams: Flouting Quality II Muffy E.A. Siegel a,b,* a

b

Temple University, USA University of Pennsylvania, USA

Received 20 January 2015; received in revised form 16 July 2015; accepted 17 July 2015

Abstract Responses like in your dreams or on some other planet have a prominent reading (SDR) that strongly denies a Given proposition p. Since speakers have no evidence about the truth of p in inaccessible places like other peoples’ dreams, an SDR speaker provides an answer (‘p in your dreams’) to the Question Under Discussion (‘?p’) that is relatively weak in the conversational context. Assuming the SDR speaker’s competence, such a weak response predictably gives rise to a conversational implicature that p is false, and focus-marking makes this negative implicature more salient. This article gives a unified pragmatic account of the previously unstudied syntactic/semantic and discourse-function properties that distinguish SDRs from other utterances with similar negative implicatures and focus: the peculiar strength of their denials, their obligatory focus-marking, their resistance to clefting, only, but, definite reference and embedding, and the displacement, by the denial implicature they engender, of their propositional content. This leaves the propositional content to contribute only Relevance implicatures. It is argued that SDRs speakers’ flouting of the second, evidence part of Grice’s Quality Maxim is responsible for all these properties, even though such Quality II flouting is unusual because evidenceless claims are predominantly also irrelevant ones. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Quality Maxim; Epistemic inaccessibility; Denial; Conversational implicature; Relevance maxim; Focus

1. Introduction and data Exchanges like those in (1)--(6) display an unmistakable denial effect: (1)

(observed) A: Waterpark lifeguard: I’m too cute to splash. B: Girl: In your DREAMS.1

(2)

(from tv soap opera All My Children (AMC)) A: Woman in love triangle: The three of us will raise the baby as one, big happy family. B: Friend: On PLANET CRAP.

(3)

(from AMC) A: Husband: You could be so much more. B: Wife: Yeah, on the other side of the RAINBOW.

* Correspondence to: Department of English/Linguistics 022-29, Temple University, 1114 Polett Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA. Tel.: +1 610 664 4475. E-mail address: [email protected]. 1 Here and elsewhere, small caps are used to indicate a pitch accent. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2015.07.008 0378-2166/© 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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(4)

(from AMC) A: Boy1: Let’s go get some go-go dancers. That could work. B: Boy2: That could work2 in your DREAMS.

(5)

(observed, single speaker) A: He has this idea that the coaches are dying to have him. . .. B: In his

(6)

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DREAMS!

(observed) Cat watches person eating salmon.3 B: Person: In your DREAMS.

Speakers perceive the denials in (1)B--(6)B as markedly strong; one young woman, who had answered a question from her landlord as in (7), later reported that answer as in (8). Thus, for this speaker at least, ‘‘in her dreams’’ paraphrases a very strong denial indeed: (7) (8)

Oh no, God no, definitely not. I basically said, ‘‘In her dreams.’’

These strong denial readings (SDRs) have not been studied before by linguists. Yet, they differ in surprisingly intricate discourse, semantic, and syntactic behaviors from parallel examples in which an SDR is not salient. Consider (9) and (10) below: (9) (10)

People regard Rowena as a real intellectual. . . in her DREAMS! People regard Rowena as real intellectual. . . in POTLATCH, IDAHO!

Both (9) and (10) would allow a hearer to infer that it is not the case that people regard Rowena as a real intellectual in the speaker’s current location or frame of reference. However, the most salient reading of (9) is as an SDR in which the speaker commits herself only to this denial: ‘It’s not the case that people regard Rowena as a real intellectual.’ Somehow, the literal, affirmative proposition expressed in (9), that people consider Rowena a real intellectual in her dreams, has been replaced. In contrast, a speaker of (10) is more likely to be taken as asserting the literal proposition expressed, that people regard Rowena as a real intellectual in Potlatch, Idaho. This is especially likely if the participants believe that the speaker knows something about Potlatch and Rowena’s experience with its citizens. Especially with a strong pitch accent on Potlatch, Idaho, (10) could also implicate by focus contrast that people do not regard Rowena as a real intellectual in other places. However, this negative implicature is not the main intended message of the utterance, and the speaker need not be committed to it. It is important to note that the factors that distinguish locations like ‘in her dreams,’ which make an SDR more salient, from those like ‘in Potlatch, Idaho,’ which favor what I will call the accessible location reading (ALR), are contextual, not lexical. That is, we can manipulate contextual factors to switch the salience of the readings of (9) and (10) to favor an ALR of (9) and a SDR of (10). To illustrate, let us choose a context for (9) which renders Rowena’s dreams accessible to the speaker in a practical way, one that favors the creation of a genuine ‘‘Rowena’s dreams’’ discourse referent. Perhaps the speaker is known to be Rowena’s therapist and, therefore, privy to all her dreams. In such a context, (9) will have a salient ALR asserting the proposition that people regard Rowena as a real intellectual in her actual dreams and, perhaps, implicating that people do not regard Rowena as a real intellectual in her real, waking life. We can, with similar contextual manipulation, influence the interpretation of (10) as well. Real places like Potlatch or Timbuktu, if they are considered far-fetched enough in a given context, may produce salient SDRs in which the speaker asserts only the complement of a discourse-given proposition. If the audience for (10), for instance, believes that its speaker has no knowledge of the actual Potlatch, Idaho, or of Rowena’s status there and therefore does not intend to set up an actual discourse referent for the place,4 an SDR would be more salient for (10) than an ALR. That is, (10) might be taken as a blanket denial of the proposition that people consider Rowena a real intellectual, with no effective claim that the residents of Potlatch admire her intellect. Given that subtle contextual conditions determine the relative salience of SDRs and ALRs, it is surprising and interesting that the two readings behave very differently. That is, SDRs, the subject of this paper, display a great many idiosyncrasies not shared by ALRs. In addition to the unusual strength of the SDRs’ denials and the fact that speakers, in

2

Small type represents phonetic reduction of Given material. Unlike examples (1)--(5), (6)B requires hearers to make an additional computation to reconstruct pragmatically the salient Given proposition it denies: ‘The cat will get some salmon’. 4 See discussion of example (14) in section 5 for evidence that SDR PPs do not introduce new discourse referents. 3

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using them, do not commit themselves to the proposition they express, SDRs are subject to a wide range of apparently syntactic/semantic constraints that do not apply to ALRs, even of the same strings. SDRs cannot undergo clefting (11), contain only (12), but (13), or antecedents of definites (14), or be embedded (15). Adding any of these features to an utterance with a salient SDR will cause it to lose its SDR, leaving only an ALR: (11)

A: B:

I bought a new Porsche last night. It’s in your DREAMS/on some other PLANET that you bought a new Porsche. (ALR only)5

(12)

A: B:

Jackson won that election. (He won that election) only in his

(13)

A: B: C: D: E: F: G:

I bought a Porsche last night! In your DREAMS. (has SDR) Yeah, in your DREAMS. (has SDR) Yeah, you bought a new Porsche in your DREAMS. (has SDR) But in your DREAMS. (ALR only) Yeah, but in your DREAMS. (ALR only) Yeah, but you bought a new Porsche in your DREAMS. (ALR only)7

(14)

A: B: C:

Myrna won a beauty contest. In her DREAMS! (has SDR) Maybe she’ll get a Ph.D. there too./They must have been very good ones that night. (ALR only)

(15)

A: B: C: D:

Ellen’s paper is a big success. Ellen’s paper is a big success in her DREAMS. (has SDR) John hopes/knows that Ellen’s paper is a big success in her DREAMS. (ALR only) If Ellen’s paper is a big success in her DREAMS, she’ll have to find another way to impress the chair. (ALR only)

FANTASIES.

(ALR only)6

(15)B, with no embedding, is fine with the usual SDR meaning that B vehemently denies that Ellen’s paper is a big success. However, (15)B cannot work as an SDR embedded under hope or know in (15)C to mean that John hopes/ knows that Ellen’s paper is not a big success. It can have only the ALR that John hopes/knows that the paper is a big success in Ellen’s actual dreams. This ALR of ‘the paper is a big success in Ellen’s DREAMS’ may, with its focus-marking, may give rise to an additional negative implicature like ‘and not in her real, waking life,’ but it still effectively asserts that the paper was a big success in Ellen’s dreams. It cannot convey the sole, blanket denial of an SDR. Similarly, in (15)D, the SDR from (15)B cannot be embedded under if to mean ‘If Ellen’s paper is not a big success, she’ll have to find another way to impress the chair.’ It has only the ALR reading that, if the paper is a big success in Ellen’s actual dreams (and, possibly, not in her real waking life), then she’ll have to find another way to impress the chair. What could account for this cluster of distinctive SDR behaviors? They do not seem to be explicable in terms of a syntactic/semantic mechanism, as SDRs do not differ from ALRs of the same utterances due to any structural ambiguity; the compositional semantics and syntax of the two kinds of readings of (9), for instance, appear to be identical. We have seen that SDRs are brought into prominence only pragmatically, by context. SDRs also cannot be lexically triggered. First, as we see in (9), a single lexical item like dreams may or may not give rise to an SDR. Second, SDRs are productive, arising easily, but not obligatorily, with complex, novel location expressions, as in (16): (16)

A:

Alice loves me! B: . . .In your twisted, perverse circus of an IMAGINATION!

It might be possible to represent the instances that allow SDRs with a pragmatically conditioned grammatical feature, but such an analysis would not be explanatory; the properties of SDRs associated with the feature would have to be

5 19 Haverford College student consultants provided informal anecdotal support for this intuition, 18 of the 19 judging that (11)B could not have an SDR. A more rigorous study would be required to confirm this experimentally. 6 We can confirm that (12)B does not have an SDR by observing that none of the constraints in this section apply to it. Clefting, but, and definites can occur felicitously, with no effect on (12)B’s readings:

(i) But it’s only in his FANTASIES that he won that election. They’re always especially happy in November. (ALR only) 7 15 Temple University student consultants provided informal anecdotal support for the intuitions in (13), judging that B--D could have an SDR in 44 out of 45 trials and that E--G could not have that reading in 40 of 45. A more rigorous study would be required to confirm this experimentally.

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stipulated. It would be preferable to explain the occurrence of SDRs and the constraints on them in terms of general interpretive principles. In this paper, I present such an analysis. I argue that SDRs, in contrast to ALRs, result from speakers’ flouting the second clause of Grice’s Quality Maxim, ‘‘Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.’’ The flouting of this submaxim is quite unusual, but when it occurs, it can give rise to the unusually strong denial implicatures we have noted. Crucially, the Quality II-flouting analysis also predicts, with no extra stipulations, the constraints in (11)--(15), as well as the displacement (as intended assertion) of the literal affirmative propositions by the emphatic denials of SDRs. Moreover, it turns out that some lexical properties of the otherwise discarded literal propositions still affect the ultimate SDR interpretation; the conditions for using in your dreams denials differ slightly from those for on some other planet ones. Even this interesting fact can be explained via standard Gricean theory, as a result of Relevance requirements. SDRs, then, present us with a set of interesting and robust facts about conversational implicatures that are clearly not lexically, semantically, or syntactically triggered.8 The fact that classic Gricean principles can be used to account for the intricate details of their behavior lends support to those principles, which provide a systematic, generative account of a phenomenon that is not otherwise amenable to grammaticization. The rest of this paper is structured as follows: section 2 investigates the contextual and discourse conditions required for SDRs to arise: epistemic inaccessibility of location PPs and Given prejacents. Section 3 presents the analysis of SDRs in terms of Quality II-flouting, including the unusual strength and at-issue status of SDR denials and the displacement by those denials of the affirmative proposition expressed. Section 4 discusses the difficulty of successfully flouting Quality II, links SDRs’ Givenness requirement to overcoming this difficulty, and includes a general discussion about conversational implicatures that are about the maxims themselves. Section 5 details how the Quality II-flouting analysis predicts the syntactic/semantic constraints on SDRs in (11)--(15) and contrasts these SDR behaviors with those of other denial expressions like when pigs fly. Section 6 accounts, via Relevance, for the lingering lexical effects on SDRs of the location PPs from their discarded literal propositions. It also extends that account to the ‘I’m not saying X, but X’ construction. Section 7 is a summary and conclusion. 2. Prerequisites for SDRs: Inaccessibility and Givenness/Focus (1)B--(6)B and other examples with salient SDRs all satisfy two important requirements. I propose that these necessary conditions for SDRs are Inaccessibility and Givenness/Focus, as described in (17) and defined in sections 2.1 and 2.2. (17)

In order to allow an SDR, an utterance must be comprised of 1. A PP that names a location (possibly abstract) that is regarded in the context as epistemically inaccessible. 2. A prejacent that is Given in the discourse, bestowing focus-marking on the remainder of the utterance,9 the location PP. The Given prejacent may be either phonetically reduced as in (4)B or elided, as in the other examples. Its previous occurrence in the discourse may be overt or pragmatically reconstructed, as in (6).

2.1. Inaccessibility We found when we coaxed (9) and (10) to swap salient readings that participants must consider a location at least potentially accessible for information-gathering in order to produce ALRs, while the perceived lack of such access is necessary for SDRs. That is, the inaccessibility required for salient SDRs is epistemic, and it depends upon contextual factors indexed to the individuals involved. The text of the comic strip in (18) below shows clearly that any available SDR gives way to an ALR whenever a participant takes the stance that he could have access to information about the location involved: (18)

from Mutts comic in Philadelphia Inquirer 2/13/2011 Panel 1: Dog: Be mine Vawentine? Raven: NEVER!

8 A full exploration of possible syntactic/semantic accounts of SDRs is beyond the scope of this paper. Any such account would have to include a way to encode in a principled, systematic way the epistemic inaccessibility of SDR locations, which distinguishes them from ALRs of the same strings, as Quality II automatically does in the pragmatic account. The best approach I have devised is having the location DPs in SDRs denote alternative worlds of evaluation, members of the set W of worlds supplied as part of the metalanguage for interpretation. This allows for explanation of the SDR constraints in terms of inaccessibility, but requires unacceptably large changes in the established architecture of semantic interpretation to have lexical material denote objects from the interpretive metalanguage that are in active use as indices in the interpretation of the very sentence in which that lexical material occurs. It would also leave the lexical Relevance facts of section 6 unaccounted for. 9 Schwarzschild (1999).

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Panel 2:

Dog: Be mine Vawentine? Cat: NIX NAY NO

Panel 3:

Dog: Be mine Vawentine? Groundhog: Perhaps in another life.

Panel 4:

Dog (smiling and wagging tail): I’m getting close!!!!

The humor in (18) depends upon the availability in Panel 3 of both an SDR and an ALR of ‘‘perhaps (I’ll be your Valentine) in another life.’’ Patrick McDonnell, the Mutts cartoonist, counts on readers to consider this other life a completely inaccessible place where nothing can be verified, on the model of the B responses in (1)--(6). On that interpretation, we get the characteristic SDR: ‘I won’t be your Valentine at all.’ In contrast, the ever-optimistic dog believes enough in reincarnation to get a different, more hopeful reading by interpreting ‘‘in another life’’ as if ‘another life’ is an accessible time/place, like New York or Potlatch, Idaho, in the ALR of (9). This degree of belief in the accessibility of other lives allows the dog to interpret the groundhog as sincerely asserting that he might be the dog’s Valentine in another life, and, consequently, the dog celebrates that he is ‘‘getting close’’ to having a Valentine of his own. The hearer will assign utterances SDRs, then, if and only if she believes that the speaker does not have access to information about the location invoked and therefore cannot have any reliable evidence about it. This is to say that SDRs require flouting the second clause of Grice’s (1975) Quality Maxim: ‘‘Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.’’ Any and only places deemed in context unavailable for evidence-gathering can contribute to SDRs: real, but private material in people’s minds like in your dreams10 or in his deluded view of reality, prohibitively difficult-to-reach places like on some other planet or on the weirdest star in the universe objects of faith like in another life, and even overtly fictional places11 like on Planet Crap, or in Oogaboogaland (observed), about which there might just not be any evidence to access. 2.2. Givenness/Focus The second SDR prerequisite in (17) is Givenness. That is, even utterances with appropriately inaccessible PPs will not produce SDRs if those PPs do not apply to a prejacent whose proposition is either Given in the discourse, as in (1)--(5), or pragmatically reconstructable from the context, as in (6). (19), for instance, contains a string that resembles an SDR, but its prejacent is new, not Given.12 (19)

Guess what! Wanda bought a house on some other PLANET!

10 In x’s dreams seems to be the most common type of SDR-producing expression, but it is not entirely typical. While PPs that allow SDRs are, in general, completely productive and therefore not listed lexically, there is some evidence that ‘in x’s dreams’ is becoming lexicalized for some speakers as meaning ‘not at all, really.’ (Thanks to Florian Schwarz for helpful discussion on this point.) Some speakers accept ‘in my dreams’ as producing an SDR, even though one’s own dreams are typically accessible, and SDRs are supposed to require an inaccessible location:

(i) (observed) I figured I’d actually be sleeping late this morning. . .in my DREAMS. (has SDR for some) We can tell that the limited acceptability of utterances like (i) is the result of lexicalization of ‘in X’s dreams,’ because substituting head nouns other than dreams, as in (ii), causes the utterances to lose their strong denial readings, exactly because the speaker’s own mental states are taken to be accessible to him. (ii) I figured I’d actually be sleeping late this morning. . .in my FANTASIES/IMAGINATION. (ALR only) Indeed, such first person examples with head nouns other than dreams fail the SDR diagnostics in (11)--(15). They can occur with clefting, only, but, definites, and embedding with no change in their ALR meaning: (iii) But it’s only in my FANTASIES that I figured I’d actually be sleeping late this morning. They were very nice ones, though. (iv) If I’d slept late in my FANTASIES, I would have had more time. The possibility that in X’s dreams is becoming lexicalized for some speakers does not, of course, obviate the need for an analysis of all the productive SDR possibilities. 11 Of course, fictional places, too, must be epistemically inaccessible to produce SDRs. Those that are susceptible to real-world verification, such as ‘the world of Sherlock Holmes,’ analyzed as modal shifters contingent upon the real world (Kratzer, 1991; von Fintel and Heim, 2009), will not produce these denials, but behave like actual places like New York or ‘Potlatch, Idaho’ in the ALR of (10). 12 The introductory ‘‘Guess what!’’ in (19) marks what follows as new, and the prejacent is not repeated, even tacitly, as a second discourse turn, as it is in SDRs.

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As an out-of-the-blue utterance, (19) lacks the strong denial reading of (1)--(6). Instead, it conveys primarily what it straightforwardly asserts: Wanda has invested in other-worldly real estate. The Givenness requirement, then, reflects the fact that denials, including SDRs, must, by definition, have a previous proposition to deny. It also explains the obligatory focus-marking of the required inaccessible location PP of (17)1. Since an SDR prejacent must be Given, the inaccessible location PP emerges as the only discourse-new information in the utterance, and, thus, will bear focus (Schwarzschild, 1999). 3. Analysis of SDRs: flouting Quality II We have documented in section 2 both the epistemic inaccessibility of the SDRs’ location PPs, which is necessary for flouting the second clause of Grice’s Quality Maxim, and the Givenness of SDRs’ prejacents, which results in focus on those PPs. In section 4, I shall argue that this second requirement, Givenness/Focus, is also necessary to the effective flouting of Quality II fundamental to the interpretation of SDRs. However, we will first see how Inaccessibility and Givenness/Focus together allow us to explain the more basic properties of SDRs: the genesis of their denials (3.1), the denials’ unusual strength (3.2), their status as at-issue material (3.3), and the denials’ displacement of the literal propositions expressed (3.4). 3.1. Denial origins With the Inaccessibility and Givenness/Focus requirements established, SDRs’ denials are not very puzzling. The Givenness requirement ensures that a SDR speaker will be responding to a previous utterance (or reconstructed proposition) which is semantically isomorphic to the SDR’s prejacent. We could view this previous utterance as a proposal to add the proposition it expresses to the Common Ground (Stalnaker, 1999) or, more dynamically, as a proposed update to the Common Ground subject to confirmation, reversal, and other rhetorical relations (Asher and Lascarides, 2003; Farkas and Bruce, 2010), or as establishing a Question Under Discussion (QUD) which must be (at least partially) answered or shown to be unanswerable (Roberts, 1996, 2012), or in any other well-documented conversational framework. The outcome will be the same: SDRs will be informationally weak. Because of SDRs’ Given prejacents, their epistemically inaccessible locations are their only possible new information, and one cannot provide information about a location specifically chosen to be unknowable. A speaker who utters a response like an SDR that is weaker than salient alternatives conveys a Quantity- and Quality 1-based conversational implicature that she is not in a position to stand behind a stronger response (Grice, 1975; Horn, 1972; Gazdar, 1979; Levinson, 1983; Hirschberg, 1991; and many others). In situations in which the speaker is considered not just cooperative, but also fully competent and knowledgeable, this unwillingness to make a stronger claim results in an implicature that the stronger claim is false, since a cooperative speaker gives the strongest informative response that is not false (Sauerland, 2004). There appear in the literature many different ways to describe the relative strength of possible responses, even in cases like SDRs, which are not strictly scalar. One can measure informativeness, relevance, or utility in the conversational context. (Hirschberg, 1991; Merin, 1999; Horn, 1989; van Rooy, 2003; van Rooij and Schulz, 2004; Schulz and van Rooij, 2006; Geurts, 2010; Faller, 2012; Sperber and Wilson, 1995, 2002). By any measure, the B responses in (1)--(6) score vanishingly low, since, as SDRs, they include inaccessible places. To take one plausible metric, van Rooy, following Merin (1999), holds that a proposition S is more relevant to goal g than a proposition T if and only if S raises the probability of g more than T does (van Rooy, 2003:269). Let us assume that a speaker’s goal g in uttering an SDR is to respond appropriately to the previous contribution A, that is, in the terms of Roberts (1996, 2012), to respond felicitously to the QUD, ‘Is it the case that A?’13 We can see that SDRs score extremely low; since participants have no access to SDR locations, they cannot evaluate the truth of propositions containing them relative to accessible worlds, so SDRs do nothing to increase the probability that the QUD will be answered or shown to be unanswerable. That is, the literal propositions expressed in SDRs cannot be members of the set of possible (partial) answers to any QUD. Since speakers cannot assign truth values to the SDRs themselves, they certainly will not perceive them as entailing the truth or falsity of those propositions that are possible answers to the QUD, in order to help resolve it. In contrast, any alternative to an SDR of the form ‘‘A/: A in an accessible place’’ would have a much higher probability of giving at least a partial answer to the QUD. Such utterances will be evaluable for truth, and, thus, if relevant to the QUD,

13 In what follows, I will discuss conversations in terms of Roberts’ QUD model, but nothing crucial hinges on this choice. In that model, the Question Under Discussion (QUD) is a question (denoting a set of possible alternative answers, q-alt(q)), whose resolution is accepted by the interlocutors as an immediate goal in a conversation (Roberts, 2012, p. 5). A contribution is responsive to the QUD if and only if it partially or completely answers the question, where a ‘‘partial answer to question q is a proposition which contextually entails the evaluation -- either true or false -- of at least one element of q-alt(q). . .[and a] complete answer is a proposition which contextually entails an evaluation -- true or false -- for each element of q-alt(q).’’ (Roberts, 2012, p. 11).

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may have entailments that help answer it. Consequently, a competent speaker’s choice to utter an SDR, rather than an alternative evaluable in the real world, implicates that no salient, stronger response to the QUD is true. This is how the speaker of (1)B implicates that the lifeguard is not too cute to splash; as a (presumed) competent arbiter of the lifeguard’s cuteness, she refuses to endorse any stronger proposition about his cuteness than the maximally weak, unevaluable (1)B. In addition to conveying negative conversational implicatures in the ordinary way just described, SDR locations, we noted in (17)2, are focus-marked. Consistent with this focus-marking, the PPs in SDRs are phonetically prominent. While many different melodies of pitch accent are acceptable in SDRs, as with focus generally, none beyond nuclear stress is required14 (Cohen, 2009; Asher and Lascarides, 2003). Focus, of course, can give rise independently to a contrast interpretation even in examples with salient ALRs, as in (10), with Potlatch, Idaho, treated as accessible. Thus, we can expect the universal focus marking of SDRs to amplify the denial effect of the negative conversational implicature by foregrounding the PPs and by explicitly evoking salient alternatives to them (Rooth, 1992). 3.2. Denial strength As illustrated in the landlord dialog in (7) and (8), the processes that contribute to SDRs produce especially strong denials. That is, the in his dreams SDR in (9) seems to express a stronger denial than the similar (10), which names an accessible place, Potlatch, Idaho, in place of his dreams. Similarly, (20)B, read as an SDR in which we have no access to the speaker’s dreams, seems to express stronger negation than it would if we took it in a context in which participants knew that the speaker did, in fact, dream that he won the lottery, either while asleep, or as an aspirational daydream. (20)

A: B: C.

I won the lottery! in your DREAMS! You won the lottery in reality. (You won the lottery)

As established in section 3.1, in order for (20)B and similar examples to give rise to negative implicatures under any interpretation, they must be weaker than other members of a set of salient alternatives. These salient alternatives vary with context. Nevertheless, the alternatives that are salient for an ALR of an utterance differ predictably from those that are salient for an SDR of the same utterance, and it is this difference that creates the difference in strength of denial. For (20), for instance, let p = ‘You won the lottery.’ The alternatives to an accessible reading of (20)B, p in your dreams, in which we are familiar with the dreams in question, would naturally include other real, accessible places/states such as { p while awake, p while alert and thinking realistically, p at the present time, etc.}. In contrast, if we use the usual inaccessible reading of in your dreams, in which the speaker is presumed to know nothing about the other person’s dreams, (20)B presents its hearers with the impossible task of evaluating a claim of lottery-winning in dreams that are inaccessible to the speaker. To make any sense of the utterance and the speaker’s behavior, a hearer must avoid this impossible task. Since the actual, accessible world is highly salient, even providing the default evaluation world for our utterances,15 by far the most salient alternative to ‘‘You won the lottery in your dreams’ in (20)B would be something like (20)C ‘You won the lottery in (accessible) reality.’ Thus, the negative implicature of an SDR will in all likelihood deny the prejacent in the whole of the real, accessible world, since that is the most salient alternative to any inaccessible place. In contrast, the negative implicatures of ordinary assertions about accessible places deny the prejacent in only some parts of the actual world: In your dreams, not while awake; in Potlatch, Idaho, not in New York, etc. The denials expressed by SDRs, therefore, are more inclusive than those expressed in otherwise similar ordinary assertions with focused accessible locations, and this is because SDRs contain the inaccessible locations that allow speakers to flout Quality II. 3.3. Denials at issue The strong, inclusive denials expressed in SDRs are especially important because, as we observed in the discussion of examples (1)--(6), they are perceived as the sole intended message of an SDR. That is, SDR speakers are understood

14 15 Temple University student consultants provided informal anecdotal support for this intuition, 14 out of 15 rating a version of (13)B, In your dreams, read with no pitch accent beyond nuclear stress acceptable for expressing disbelief in (13)A, I bought a new Porsche last night. More rigorous studies would be required to confirm this experimentally and to investigate thoroughly the phonology of SDRs. It is possible, for instance, that in X’s dreams SDRs may occur felicitously without a special marked pitch accent only because they are lexicalized as expressions of disbelief for some speakers. 15 ‘In your dreams’ does not contrast directly with the default world index for interpretation, but only with an ordinary lexical denotation for the actual world, an object of some kind in the model. This is because members of alternative sets must be of the same type. Having lexical material like in your dreams denote something from the interpretive metalanguage to match the world index, rather than something within the model, would be a radical departure from accepted models of semantic interpretation. (See the related footnote 8.).

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to be asserting only strong, implicated denials of a previous contribution, not the literal propositions they express. Since Potts (2005) identifies his at-issue meaning as roughly the kind of meaning that is asserted, we can test this intuition about what is asserted in an SDR by applying the accepted diagnostics for at-issueness in (21) (Simons et al., 2010; Murray, 2014). (21)

p is at-issue if and only if 1. Speaker commits to the truth of p 2. p is responsive to a QUD on the table 3. p is directly challengeable

The tests in (21) confirm that it is not the literal propositions that are at-issue in SDRs, but the implicated denials. We have already observed that, in (1)B--(6)B and other SDRs, the B speakers have not committed themselves to the truth of the propositions they utter, and the propositions expressed are not responsive to the QUDs established in A. For instance, the girl in the waterpark has not, by virtue of uttering (1)B, committed herself to the proposition that the lifeguard, in fact, dreams of being too cute to splash (How could she possibly know this?). Similarly, we established in section 3.1 that an SDR of You’re too cute to splash in your dreams does not address the question of whether the addressee is too cute to splash in reality. As for the third criterion in (21), SDRs’ literal propositions are also not directly challengeable. Indeed, anyone who tried to challenge (1)B as in (22) would have missed (1)B’s point. (1)

A: B:

Waterpark lifeguard: I’m too cute to splash. Girl: In your DREAMS.

(22)

No, I don’t think that lifeguard really dreams about how cute he is.

That point of (1)B, of course, is the vehement denial of (1)A: ‘You are not too cute to splash,’ and this is the at-issue meaning of (1)B; the speaker commits to it, and it is responsive to the QUD, which it resolves(negatively). Moreover, this strong denial can be directly challenged, as in (23)C below: (23)

A: B: C:

Waterpark lifeguard: I’m too cute to splash. Girl: In your DREAMS. Waterpark lifeguard: No, I AM too cute to splash. My long, curly hair makes me so attractive to customers that I g bonuses if I avoid getting it wet.

In contrast, the propositional content of the more ordinary A assertions in (1)--(6), test as at-issue: The lifeguard, for instance, in uttering (1)A, commits to its truth, addresses a QUD raised contextually by the girls’ splashing him (‘Is it OK for you to splash me?’), and allows for a direct challenge, as in (24): (1) (24)

A: B:

Waterpark lifeguard: I’m too cute to splash. No, you’re not!

The same is true even of ALRs of strings with potential SDRs, like (10), repeated below: (10) (25)

People regard Rowena as real intellectual. . .in POTLATCH, IDAHO! No, they don’t!

The propositions expressed in many utterances very similar to SDRs are at-issue, but the literal propositions expressed in SDRs are not. Instead, they are displaced by strong, implicated denials of a previous contribution as the main at-issue message of the utterance. We shall see in section 3.4 that this displacement comes about, once more, through entirely predictable Gricean reasoning. 3.4. Displacement by denial Assertions with ordinary locations, we have seen, typically present the propositions they express as at-issue information, as in (26)A and B. Any possible negative implicatures, such as (26)C are cancelable and not-at-issue. (26)

A: B: C:

The coaches are dying to have him. . .. In NORTH DAKOTA! (Possible negative implicature: . . . not at Cal, Stanford, Oregon or other, more nearby/practical/attractive alternatives.’)

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In contrast, we saw in section 3.3 that SDRs have as their at-issue contribution only the implicated denials of previous contributions. That is, readings including ordinary, accessible locations have the form (assert) B ^ (implicate) : A typical of scalar implicatures with focus. However, by flouting Quality II, an SDR speaker prompts listeners to reason in this way: Since a cooperative speaker would not assert something for which he has no evidence, the listener, as a cooperative participant, should ignore the speaker’s apparent assertion of B, the unverifiable proposition expressed. Instead, listeners know to take the flouting as a signal to find another, implicated interpretation for the peculiar SDR utterance, and the most saliently available one is the remaining conjunct of (assert)B ^ (implicate): A, which is (implicate) : A.16 However, a cooperative participant is also expected to contribute some at-issue meaning, something that could address the QUD. Since SDRs are designed not to be taken as felicitously asserting the propositions they express, they leave the negative implicature they engender, : A, as the speaker’s only plausible intended at-issue contribution. That is, the audience has no choice but to infer that an SDR speaker meant to convey (assert) : A. Indeed, we saw in (23) that this denial represents a plausible speaker commitment, addresses the QUD, and is directly challengeable. SDRs, then, lend support to the idea that the genesis of a particular meaning does not necessarily determine its role in discourse (Murray, 2014). Meanings that arise as the compositional interpretation of what is said may be disregarded entirely or provide only not-at-issue updates to the conversation (See section 6); others that arise as presuppositions or implicatures, like the SDR denials, may end up, through pragmatic reasoning, providing the at-issue entailments of Potts (2005). The displacement as at-issue contribution of the asserted proposition by its negative implicature is not unique to SDRs. Something similar happens in ironic utterances such as ‘‘You’re a great friend,’’ uttered in a context in which a friend has betrayed the speaker (Grice, 1975; Searle, 1993). In such ironic utterances, the speaker is perceived to have flouted the first clause of the Quality Maxim, ‘‘Do not say that which you believe to be false’’ (Searle, 1993), rather than the second Quality clause (‘‘Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence’’), as in SDRs. Since the implicature (‘You’re a bad friend’) and the apparent assertion (‘You’re a great friend’) are contradictory in irony, and only one, the implicature, accords with the facts, hearers choose as the intended at-issue contribution the one higher in relevance to the speaker’s apparent goals, the implicature consistent with the facts. Thus, the success of irony, like that of SDRs, depends upon the hearer’s inferring the speaker’s intention that she allow a conversationally implicated negation to displace the apparently asserted proposition as the main intended at-issue contribution. 4. Obstacles to flouting Quality II: implicatures about maxims and obligatory focus The Quality II-flouting analysis of SDRs just presented in section 3 accounts neatly for their origins, the properties of the denials they express, and the at-issue status of those denials. In the next section, we will see that such an analysis also allows us to account for the peculiar syntactic/semantic constraints on SDRs presented in (11)--(15). First, however, it is worthwhile exploring the relationship between SDRs’ flouting of Quality II and their unusual requirement for focus-marking on their inaccessible location PPs. One reason for that focus-marking is that the balance of the SDR sentence, its prejacent, must be Given in the discourse in order for an SDR speaker to be able to deny it. However, it turns out that any utterance, not just a denial, must have obvious relevance to the previous contribution in order for its speaker to be perceived as flouting Quality II. Including a Given proposition (as in SDRs) is an automatically available way to satisfy this requirement in denials. That is, like many idiosyncratic properties of SDRs, obligatory focus-marking is also linked to SDRs’ obligatory flouting of Quality II. To understand the link, it helps to view SDRs as an instance of a more general pragmatic phenomenon of conversational implicatures that happen to be about the maxims. I describe this in (27): (27)

When a first speaker (A) has contributed an assertion, the salient flouting by a second speaker (B) of any (sub) maxim can produce the implicature that A’s contribution is in violation of that (sub)maxim.

Examples of the process described in (27) for each (sub)maxim appear in (28)--(32). (28)

Quality clause I A: Standardized test scores are up 42% in our school. B: And I’m a monkey’s uncle/the Queen of Sheba! Implicature (with competence assumption): A is false.

16 It would not be possible to account for the strong denials of SDRs with only the flouting of Quality II and no recourse to the Quantity-based, scalar-type implicatures and focus contrast described in section 3.1. As it will be demonstrated in section 4, without the Given prejacent and focused PP of an SDR, flouting Quality II leads to implicatures of irrelevance or inadequate evidence, not denial. However, if one corrects that problem by introducing the characteristic SDR Given/focused information structure, it brings into play a set of stronger, salient alternatives to the focus-marked item, and negative conversational implicatures will arise as described in section 3.1.

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(29)

Quantity part I (Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange.) A: Standardized test scores are up 42% in our school. B: blah, blah, blah Implicature: A does not contain sufficient (useful) information.

(30)

Quantity part II (Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.) A: Standardized test scores are up 42% in our school. B: And 47% of the kids didn’t use the right pencil, 6 didn’t answer question five, and 179 of them don’t know the capital of Denmark. Implicature: A contains unnecessary information.

(31)

Relation A: Standardized test scores are up 42% in our school. B: And my Aunt Gladys raises carrier pigeons. Implicature: A is irrelevant.

(32)

Manner A:

Mean aggregate scores on standardized comprehensive examinations have ascended to levels 42% in excess of previous scores. B: Your pronouncement, respected colleague, constitutes exceptionally outstanding tidings. Implicature: A is inappropriate in manner (prolix, overly formal). A: STANDARDIZED TEST SCORES ARE UP 42% IN OUR SCHOOL. (said markedly loudly/softly) B: THAT’S GREAT PROGRESS (said markedly loudly/softly) Implicature: A is inappropriately loud/soft.

In (28)--(32), we see the B speaker flouting each maxim in turn. The speaker of (28)B clearly does not believe ‘I’m a monkey’s uncle’ to be true; the (29)B speaker knows that ‘blah, blah, blah’ does not give the listener sufficient information, while the (30)B speaker is saying more than she needs to; similarly, (31)B’s response ‘My Aunt Gladys raises carrier pigeons’ is not relevant to A’s contribution, and the (32)B responses are prolix and obscure in the first exchange and notably too loud/soft in the second. In each case, though, the B speaker succeeds in implicating that (in her opinion) the A speaker has violated the maxim that she herself has flouted. This happens because a cooperative A speaker will note B’s salient flouting of a maxim and, in an effort to construe his interlocutor’s odd behavior as responsive and relevant to his own, A, contribution, he will likely conclude that B intended to implicate that A’s own contribution also violated that maxim. What happens, now, if we try to produce an example like (28)--(32) in which it is the second clause of Quality that is flouted, that is, if we have B reply with an assertion of a proposition for which she has no evidence, rather than a blatantly false one, as in (28)? It turns out that most attempts to impugn the evidence for an A utterance by saying something blatantly unverifiable (but not necessarily false) produce implicatures of irrelevance, not lack of evidence: (33)

A: Standardized test scores are up 42% in our school. B: Your grandfather’s third cousin’s step-niece always wanted to go to a school like ours. Implicature: A is irrelevant.

(34)

A: I bought a new designer dress. B: The first colonists on Mars will get new dresses every week. Implicature: A is irrelevant.

It seems that we do not get the implicature results for Quality II that we get for all the other maxims and submaxims because assertions about epistemically inaccessible things are generally perceived as irrelevant to claims about the actual world, so it is the Maxim of Relation that usually seems to be flouted, not Quality II. The only way that a B speaker could ensure that a flouting of Quality II is understood as such would be by maximizing the relevance of the B utterance to the A utterance, that is, by making A Given, as the topic of B. This is exactly what speakers of SDRs accomplish: (35)

Quality clause II (SDR) A: Standardized test scores are up 42% in our school. B: (Standardized tests scores are up 42% in our school) in your DREAMS. Implicature: A is false.

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By taking the prejacent of (35)B as Given in A, the speaker of B successfully makes his utterance about A. Now, it no longer appears that Relation (to A) is flouted. This leaves the focused, epistemically inaccessible SDR location, the only discourse-new information in the utterance, as the only possible flouting element. And, of course, the submaxim that SDR PPs like in your dreams can be used to flout is the second clause of Quality. A speaker could have no good evidence for anything that he says about a place that he has specifically selected for its epistemic inaccessibility. SDRs, though, seem to break one part of the pattern described in (27) and illustrated in (28)--(32). In all the other examples, whenever a second speaker flouts any cooperative expectation, the implicature derived is that the previous speaker has violated that same expectation. Following this pattern, we would expect exchanges in which a second speaker B flouts Quality II, as in SDRs, to implicate only that there is no good evidence for the proposition expressed in the first contribution A, not that it is false. This is because lack of evidence is the burden of Quality II, the submaxim that B has flouted. In fact, the Quality II submaxim can fulfill this expectation; it is possible, in rare, non-SDR contexts, to construct utterances that can perform the predicted flouting of Quality II to produce the implicature that a previous speaker lacks adequate evidence for his contribution. We need only create a context like that in (36), in which B flouts Quality II with a response that can be taken as sufficiently relevant to A’s contribution to avoid the effect of Relation-flouting we found in (33) and (34): (36)

A: B:

Those strangers at the other end of our subway car are nice. Yeah, I bet they have only sweet dreams, eat organic food, treat their four cats kindly, and read a lot of good books. Implicature: There is inadequate evidence for A.

In (36), B succeeds in producing the predicted inadequate evidence implicature from a Quality II flouting. First, B clearly flouts the Quality II submaxim, since she could not have good evidence about the specific habits of strangers on a subway. Second, though, B’s contribution is also evidently relevant to the A contribution, elaborating on the supposed properties of the people who are the topic of that contribution. Finally, it establishes this relevance without repeating any material Given in A, avoiding the obligatory focus-marking that characterizes SDRs. However, the kind of focus-less relevance of B to A established in (36) is not available in an SDR. This is because of the rhetorical relations obtaining between the contributions. Using Asher and Lascarides’ (2003) model, B’s contribution in (36) is an Elaboration of A’s, while SDRs, as denials, express Contrast. Contrast rhetorical relations, unlike Elaboration, require partial semantic isomorphism of B to A. We can see this if we construct an example such as (37)B, which includes the inaccessible location adjunct of an SDR, but lacks SDRs’ isomorphism. Without the Given, isomorphic prejacent, we do not get an SDR; (37)B is much more likely to be taken to be as a very strange non-sequitur than as a denial. (37)

A: B: C:

Those strangers at the other end of our subway car are nice. Yeah, I bet they have only sweet dreams, eat organic food, treat their four cats kindly and read a lot of good books on some other PLANET. (They’re nice) on some other PLANET.

To get an SDR, then, we must allow the prejacent to be isomorphic to (part of) a previous contribution, as in (37)C and SDR examples throughout this paper. However, under such circumstances, the successful flouting of Quality II produces the complete denial implicature that A is false (given a competence assumption for the speaker of B), not just that Speaker A’s evidence is inadequate. This happens because, as we have seen in this section, it is required that most of an SDR be Given in its discourse in order for hearers to perceive it as both relevant enough to that discourse to flout Quality II, rather than Relation, and appropriately isomorphic to support a Contrast relation. The Given status of the bulk of an SDR utterance means, in turn, that the remaining portion -- the SDR PP itself -- is focused (Schwarzschild, 1999). Once this focus structure is in place, it engenders, at least through the contrast interpretation of focus discussed in section 3.1, the characteristic SDR denial: : ( p in accessible reality). There is no way to prevent cooperative listeners from concluding that this evident denial implicature is the one that the speaker intended to convey with her flouting of Quality II. SDRs’ focus requirement, then, is another indicator that the SDR denial reading depends upon the flouting of the second clause of Quality for its genesis and is not merely the result of exhaustification through a scalar-like implicature, which would not require focus. 5. Quality II-flouting, constraints on SDRs, and flying pigs Having established that both the strong at-issue denials of SDRs and their obligatory focus-marking are related to the Quality II-flouting that defines SDRs, we are now in a position to explain the syntactic/semantic constraints on SDRs first presented in examples (11)--(15) in section 1 and repeated below. Like the other properties of SDRs we have investigated,

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the fact that SDRs cannot undergo clefting, contain only, but or antecedents of definites, or be embedded, without reverting to ALRs stems ultimately from their flouting of the evidence clause of the Quality Maxim. We will see in (38) and (39) that when pigs fly denial expressions, which do not flout Quality II, are not subject to these SDR constraints. The constraints on clefting, only, but and definites in SDRs come about because the epistemic inaccessibility of the locations in SDRs, necessary to signal an intention to flout Quality II, also makes it impossible for participants to know about the states of affairs that hold in such locations. Consequently, they have no way of evaluating the truth of the literal assertion made in an SDR.17 This means that constructions that presuppose the truth of their content cannot be given SDR denial readings. Consider, first, the constraint on clefting illustrated in (11): (11)

A: B:

I bought a new Porsche last night. It’s in your DREAMS that you bought a new Porsche. (ALR only)

The lack of true SDR denial readings in clefts is easily explained in terms of the peculiar relationship to truth in the actual world that SDRs’ inaccessible locations bring about. The non-focused material in a cleft sentence is presupposed to be true in the actual world of the conversation, while the non-focused material in the B contributions of SDR discourses (such as ‘You bought a new Porsche’ in (11)B) is not only not presupposed to be true, but is ultimately effectively denied by the utterance. Consequently, SDRs do not emerge in clefts. Only, similarly, has the effect of limiting a potential SDR to its accessible-location interpretation: (12)

A: B:

Jackson won that election. (He won that election) only in his

FANTASIES.

(ALR only)

(12)B does not have the SDR denial reading, but just the reading that Jackson won the election in his real world fantasies and (possibly) not in other parallel accessible circumstances. This makes sense, too, when we see SDR locations as inaccessible places where nothing is known to be true (or false). Such a meaning is inconsistent with that of only, which entails (or presupposes) that one case is true (but no more). Consequently, utterances like (12)B cannot have an SDR, but rather treat Jackson’s fantasies as an accessible location parallel to North Dakota in (26)B. For similar reasons, SDRs also cannot occur with but. (13)

A: B: C: D: E: F: G:

I bought a Porsche last night! In your DREAMS. (has SDR) Yeah, in your DREAMS. (has SDR) Yeah, you bought a new Porsche in your DREAMS. (has SDR) But in your DREAMS. (ALR only) Yeah, but in your DREAMS. (ALR only) Yeah, but you bought a new Porsche in your DREAMS. (ALR only)

This odd constraint on but can also be explained in terms of its meaning’s interaction with speakers’ inability to assign truth values to SDRs, due to their characteristic inaccessible locations.18 Since but means ‘and’ plus a contrast between the two clauses it joins, it cannot felicitously conjoin a felicitous assertion (‘I bought a new Porsche last night.’) with an unevaluable non-assertion19 (‘You bought a new Porsche last night in your DREAMS), since no contrast between the two conjuncts could be perceived if one conjunct, the SDR, cannot be assigned a truth value. Consequently, expressions like those in (13)E--G exhibit only an ALR meaning of in your dreams; the speaker is understood to be asserting that the addressee bought the Porsche in his actual, accessible dreams, and perhaps implicating that he did not buy it while alert. Quality II-flouting explains even the ban on the antecedents of definites in SDRs. While grammatically definite phrases such as her dreams occur in SDR PPs, they do not introduce new discourse referents. In (14)C, for instance, we cannot refer back to the dreams in (14)B with a definite pro-form without limiting (14)B to an ALR: (14)

A: B: C:

Myrna won a beauty contest. In her DREAMS! (has SDR) Maybe she’ll get a Ph.D. there too./They must have been very good ones that night. (ALR only)

17 Indeed, it is difficult to say whether an SDR like the waterpark girl’s (1)B ((You’re too cute to splash) in your DREAMS) is true or false. The question seems almost irrelevant, as in your DREAMS has been chosen precisely because it is inaccessible. The speaker just intends for her audience to conclude from the oddness of her using such an expression that her main intended message is to deny the lifeguard’s preceding contribution. 18 Thanks to Maribel Romero (pc) for bringing this to my attention. 19 SDRs do not pass the tests for at-issue meaning in (21).

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The explanation for this peculiar fact is, again, that SDR locations can name only epistemically inaccessible places, which, by their nature, are not identified with individuals in the model. (14)B, as an SDR, does not entail that there are dreams of Myrna’s in which she won a beauty contest; the speaker is not predicating anything of such dreams. Rather, the DPs of SDRs behave like others known not to favor the establishment of new specific discourse referents, such as those in intensional contexts or predicate nominals (Karttunen, 1976).20 Consequently, SDRs do not survive in utterances like (14)C. The final constraint on SDRs, illustrated in (15), bans embedding: (15)

A: B: C: D:

Ellen’s paper is a big success. Ellen’s paper is a big success in her DREAMS. (has SDR) John hopes/knows that Ellen’s paper is a big success in her DREAMS. (ALR only) If Ellen’s paper is a big success in her DREAMS, she’ll have to find another way to impress the chair. (ALR only)

While Quality II-flouting in particular does not explain the unavailability of SDRs in embedded constructions, such restriction to root constructions is typical of readings arising through most kinds of conversational implicature. According to traditional Gricean pragmatics, conversational implicatures arise only in root environments since conveying conversational implicatures by flouting maxims is part of a speaker’s intention within the utterance context. Consequently, clauses that are embedded and, so, not directly under the speech act cannot flout maxims21 (Grice, 1975; Levinson, 1983; Horn, 1989; van Rooij and Schulz, 2004; Russell, 2006). The constraints on SDRs explained in this section as linked to Quality II-flouting are useful as diagnostics for SDRs. For instance, the group of denial expressions exemplified by when pigs fly and when hell freezes over name eventualities which are impossible in, not just inaccessible to, the real world. We can demonstrate that when pigs fly denials do not have SDRs by showing that the SDR constraints do not apply to them: Unlike SDRs, they can occur out-of-the-blue without a Given prejacent (38) and experience no loss of their blanket denial meaning in clefts, with only and but, and in embedded constructions ((39)B--F).22 (38) (39)

I have some discouraging news for you: Our noisy neighbors will move away when pigs fly!23 A: I’m going to drop out of school! B: It’ll be when hell freezes over (that you’ll drop out of school). C: Only when pigs fly. D: (Yeah,) but when hell freezes over. E: Mary thinks/knows that you’ll drop out of school when pigs fly.

The idiosyncratic constraints on SDRs, then, do not apply to other, superficially similar denial expressions. Instead, they are very specific results of SDRs’ pragmatic origin in a flouting of Quality II. 6. Lexical effects So far, our SDR analysis predicts that a speaker should be able to use any inaccessible place she pleases in order to trigger an SDR implicature and to induce her audience to infer that she intends for that implicature to displace her directly

20 SDR locations’ failure to establish new discourse referents is not merely the result of the possible lexicalization of in x’s dreams (footnote 10). The same behavior is observed with less conventional SDR locations, such as on the creepiest planet in the solar system. 21 There have been claims that conversational implicatures can be computed locally in the grammar as part of semantic interpretation (Cohen, 1971; Chierchia, 2004, 2012), but those claims pertain to Quantity, not Quality. Unmarked, sentence-level irony or sarcasm, for instance, resists embedding just as SDRs do. ‘‘John hopes that you’re a great friend’’ cannot be used to mean ‘John hopes that you’re a bad friend,’ even in contexts that suggest it. Camp (2012) provides ten examples of embedded sarcasm, but nine of them, she notes later, require marked intonation on particular lexical items, suggesting a grammatical origin distinct from that of less local and marked examples of irony. In the tenth, I’m sure appears to function as an epistemic discourse marker, rather than a true matrix clause. 22 Like the inaccessible places of SDRs, when pigs fly expressions are not quite comfortable as antecedents of definites. This is because they, too, disallow the establishment of discourse referents, but for a slightly different reason from SDRs: Since the when pigs fly expressions name impossible eventualities, they are interpreted as ‘never,’ and negation interferes with the establishment of discourse referents (Karttunen, 1976).:

(i) A: I’ll come back here when hell freezes over! B: ? #Good, I’ll be gone by then. 23 16 Temple University student consultants provided informal anecdotal support for this intuition. 15 of the 16 accepted (40) as a way to break the news that the neighbors will not be moving away. The same group did not accept with that meaning a parallel example with the SDR-friendly PP on Planet Crap in place of when pigs fly. A more rigorous study would be required to confirm this experimentally.

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expressed proposition as her main, at-issue meaning. In fact, though, the lexical content of an SDR is not completely replaced by the negative implicature it leads to, as happens in irony. In irony, what is said and what is implicated are inconsistent, in fact, complementary, and cannot stand together. No such inconsistency occurs in SDRs -- John can easily win the lottery in his dreams and not win it in the actual world. As a result, the effects of the SDR speaker’s lexical choices for her displaced direct assertion linger: A speaker may use in your DREAMS to produce an SDR only with propositions that she thinks the A speaker might have dreamt of, in the positive sense of ‘‘following one’s dreams.’’24 Similarly, on some other planet SDRs will be felicitous only with propositions that B considers outlandish, but not necessarily desirable: (40)

A: B: C:

I’m going to burn dinner! #In your DREAMS! Your dinners always come out great. On some other PLANET! Your dinners always come out great.

Both (40)B and C are effective SDR denials of (40)A. Nevertheless, if one wanted to reassure an insecure cook, (40)B would be useless, almost self-defeating, since it suggests, through the lexical properties of dreams, that the speaker believes that the cook muses happily about burning meals. (40)C, though, would be reassuring, in that it suggests that the speaker considers the possibility of a burnt dinner outlandishly remote. These lexical effects are not truth-functional and not-at-issue. As we saw in (22), one cannot directly challenge an SDR denial of the form ‘p in his DREAMS’ by objecting that p is not the sort of thing that the subject would dream about. Rather, a hearer is more likely to respond to the infelicitous (40)B as he would to an utterance with an unsatisfied presupposition or implausible implicature (Horn, 1989), asking ‘‘What do you mean?’’ or ‘‘Wait a minute! I’m glad you’re so sure I won’t burn dinner, but why are you suggesting that I dream of burning it?’’ These not-at-issue lexical effects in SDRs seem to be a result of the cooperative hearer’s reasoning from Grice’s Maxim of Relation/Relevance (‘‘Be relevant.’’). Why would the SDR speaker choose even to mention burning dinner in one’s dreams in (40)B if she did not consider burning dinner dream-worthy? After all, such a speaker has her choice of any inaccessible place with which to construct an SDR and could just as well have chosen on some other planet. However, Relation alone does not get us from flouting Quality II with ‘(You’re going to burn dinner) in your DREAMS’ in (40)B to ‘you aspire to burning dinner,’ which is closer to what is actually contributed. This step takes place because a cooperative hearer feels compelled to go to great lengths to see the utterance as satisfying Relation by construing the direct content of an SDR as somehow relevant to the QUD (‘Am I going to burn dinner?’), but still consistent with the speaker’s main intended at-issue message, the implicated denial which responds negatively to that QUD.25 That is, he needs to find a reading of the SDR B contribution that is both responsive to A and consistent with :A. For example, for (40), an interpretation of ‘You’re going to burn dinner in your dreams’ that renders it relevant to and consistent with :A (‘You’re not going to burn dinner’) is that the addressee’s aspirations or hopes include burning dinner. That is, you’re not going to burn dinner (in reality); you’re going to burn it in (happy) daydreams. Similarly, for the more felicitous (40)C, the most salient interpretation of not-at-issue ‘You’re going to burn dinner on some other planet’ that is relevant to the speaker’s conversational goal and consistent with ‘You’re not going to burn dinner (in reality)’ is ‘You’re going to burn dinner in some unimaginably remote circumstance.’ Such compromise construals seem to be the rule whenever addressees try to interpret as relevant the lexical content of material that has been displaced as the main intended meaning in favor of a conversational implicature that its utterance has engendered. An example unrelated to SDRs is the ‘I’m not saying X, but X’ construction described in Siegel (2005). Siegel (2005) reports that 90% of subjects (N = 40) presented with (41) below in a natural conversational setting judged that it said (or probably said) that the classroom is hard to find: (41)

(Siegel’s (13))

I’m not saying that this classroom is hard to find, but I did go to every other room in the building before I got here.

This dominant at-issue meaning of (41) arises as a conversational implicature, like the SDR denial reading. However, it depends upon the Maxim of Relation: Addressees reason that there is no point for the speaker to bring up and even, in the second clause, give evidence for, the proposition that the room is hard to find if it is not relevant to what she intends to convey. Indeed, comedians and others routinely communicate such implicatures via Relation with utterances as brief as (42), implicating ‘My boss is stupid’:

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Thanks to a member of a Haverford College audience who pointed this out. The literal reading of the SDR, which has been set aside as informationally weak, is disqualified as a plausible choice. ‘You’re going to burn the dinner in your dreams’ is not only lacking a good evidential basis; as we saw in section 3.1, as an SDR, it also fails to address the QUD ‘Am I going to burn dinner?’. 25

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(42)

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I’m not saying my boss is stupid, but. . .

The audience for (41) and (42) has to reconcile the inclusion by an apparently cooperative speaker of an assertion of ‘I’m not saying X’ when the main intended message of the utterance is the ‘X’ implicated via Relevance. That is, as in SDRs, the literal assertion and the implicature that can supplant it as the speaker’s main intended message are not inconsistent. One can be committed to X but not be saying it. As in SDRs, hearers of ‘‘I’m not saying X’’ utterances must find an interpretation which is both responsive to any QUD on the table and consistent with both ‘I’m not saying X’ and ‘X.’ The construal most people choose is that, although the speaker is conveying X, she isn’t really saying X or wants things to be as if she hasn’t said X. Of the 35 subjects who read (41) as saying that the classroom was hard to find, 21 of them commented about why they thought the speaker included ‘‘I’m not saying’’ with ‘‘this classroom is hard to find,’’ even though it was their judgment that she did intend to communicate that the classroom was, indeed, hard to find. The comments suggested that ‘‘I’m not saying’’ here served as a ‘‘buffer’’ and meant that the speaker would rather not be (held responsible for) saying that the classroom was hard to find, that is, that the speaker wasn’t really saying it or did not want to be taken as really saying it. Speakers come up with such interpretations, then, whenever Relevance concerns make it necessary for them to reconcile material from literal assertions with the conversational implicatures that displace the literal assertions as the main message conveyed. Such loose and farfetched construals, whether in SDRs or in I’m not saying X, but X constructions are hard to predict and account for, except as evidence of speakers’ great creativity in their drive to maintain cooperative conversation. 7. Summary and conclusion We have seen that, in order to generate an SDR, the prejacent p of an utterance of the form ( p)PP must be Given, while its new information, the DP head of the PP, must denote an epistemically inaccessible place. This Givenness of the prejacent allows the SDR to maximize its relevance to the previous discourse, leading a cooperative hearer to conclude that the SDR speaker intends to flout the evidence clause of the Quality Maxim, not just the Maxim of Relation. The Givenness of the prejacent p of an SDR also means that the inaccessible location PP will bear focus, evoking a set of alternative propositions, including most saliently ‘p in reality.’ Given this salient, accessible alternative, the SDR speaker’s choice to utter instead the relatively uninformative ‘p in some inaccessible place’ gives rise to a Quantity/Quality-based implicature that p is not true in reality (assuming speaker competence on the matter). Since this new denial implicature : ( p in reality) is much more useful in accomplishing the SDR speaker’s goal of responding to the previous contribution than her original proposition about an inaccessible place, the SDR is treated as the intended at-issue meaning of the utterance. However, that is not the end of the role of the literal proposition expressed in the SDR. The Maxim of Relation leads addressees to seek a relevant purpose for any part of a speaker’s utterance, even lexical choices made for a proposition ultimately displaced as at-issue meaning. Such second-chance interpretations need only be both felicitous in the conversation and consistent with the speaker’s intended at-issue contribution, and cooperative interlocutors go to some lengths to find them. This latest round of Gricean reasoning gives displaced literal content another chance at contributing to the interpretation of the utterance, illustrating the complexity of the effects of the pragmatics of information exchange on what is communicated. SDRs are marked and somewhat rare. However, the analysis presented here shows them to be the result of interesting and subtle interplay among discourse coherence relations, focus, and classic Gricean reasoning at multiple junctures. It thus provides evidence for the accuracy and utility of the standard theories involved, as well as highlighting the complexity of their interaction. SDRs provide a clear illustration that the level at which meaning arises -- from direct composition or as conversational implicature--does not predict its at-issue status: The at-issue information conveyed by SDRs arises as conversational implicature via the flouting of Quality II; SDRs’ literal assertions persist only as implicatures. Our examination of this process has also revealed the special conditions required for flouting the second, evidence clause of the Quality Maxim, as well as the possibility of generating conversational implicatures that are about any maxim or submaxim. Most notably, SDRs present us with a robust, productive, and complex phenomenon whose apparently diverse properties are entirely explicable only in terms of well-established general pragmatic principles. Acknowledgments I am extremely grateful to Satoshi Tomioka and Florian Schwarz for their generosity in talking with me over many years about several different versions of this work and for the usefulness and wisdom of their ideas and suggestions. I thank

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Daniel Altshuler, Patricia Irwin, Jeffrey Kaplan, Eric McCready, Judith Weiner, some anonymous readers, and Shizhe Huang and her Haverford College students for their interest and helpful comments on my earlier ideas about SDRs. I am also indebted to Sarah Murray, Richard Heiberger, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Valerie Monash, and Maribel Romero for helpful discussion about particular issues related to this work. I alone am responsible for any remaining errors. My appreciation goes, also, to Temple University for the Research and Study Leave that made it possible for me to pursue the first phase of this work. Finally, I am indebted to Miriam Bowring and Andrea Bowring for finding the SDR construction at a waterpark. References Asher, Nicholas, Lascarides, Alex, 2003. Logics of Conversation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Camp, Elisabeth, 2012. Sarcasm, pretense, and the semantics/pragmatics distinction. Nouˆ s 46 (4), 587--634. Chierchia, Gennaro, 2004. 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