On the Central and Marginal Debate of Embedded Implicatures: Evidence from Chinese

Over the past two decades, embedded implicatures-a core construct in the interface of semantics and pragmatics-have attracted extensive attention among pragmaticists, semanticists and philosophers of language, spawning a wealth of theoretical debates and empirical investigations. An embedded implicature denotes a pragmatic inference that arises not at the propositional level of an utterance, but within a subordinate linguistic structure (e.g., a clause, phrase, or quantifier phrase). A highly controversial issue at the heart of these discussions pertains to whether embedded implicatures are central or marginal. In this paper, we addressed this pivotal question through a rigorous questionnaire-based approach conducted within a Chinese linguistic context, with the aim of providing empirical evidence rooted in non-English discourse data. The results consistently demonstrate that the phenomenon of embedded implicature is central rather than marginal. In the pilot test, the average proportion of embedded Q1 [uantiy]-implicature, embedded I[nformativeness]-implicature and embedded M[anner]-implicature is 67%, 67% and 80% respectively, which is apparently predominant; the average proportion of embedded Q2 [uality]-implicature is 49%, which is close to a predominant level. In the formal test, the average proportion of embedded Q1-implicature, embedded I-implicature, embedded M-implicature and embedded Q2-implicature is 77%, 72%, 68% and 78%. Collectively, these cross-test data provide compelling confirmation of Neo-Gricean theoretical postulates, with Levinson’s model receiving particularly robust empirical reinforcement, thereby shedding new light on the cross-linguistic validity of implicature theories.