A Neo-Gricean Pragmatic Analysis of Embedded Implicatures

Philosophers of language, semanticists and pragmaticists have carried out extensive research on the phenomenon of embedded implicature over the past two decades. One of the current debates is ‘whether embedded implicatures are recovered semantically or pragmatically’. In this paper, we examine hearers’ recovery of embedded implicature within the framework proposed by neo-Gricean pragmaticists, especially Horn, Levinson and Huang. We argue that hearers would first focus on the lexical word that can trigger a scale to extract a relevant scale. Based upon the scale, he/she is able to calculate a pre-semantic conversational implicature. Then he/she would decode the semantic meaning of the whole utterance. Finally, he/she could take both the pre-semantic conversational implicature and semantic meaning into account to obtain an embedded implicature. In a word, we postulate embedded implicatures as results of the interaction between pre-semantic conversational implicatures and semantic meanings. Furthermore, we hold that embedded implicatures are products of pre-semantic conversational implicatures’ projection onto semantic meanings.