Will in Semantics and Pragmatics

Gricean views of exhausitification.

Big congratulations to Will Zumchak, whose paper with undergraduate mentor Bernhard Schwarz, "Gricean views of exhaustification," is now published in Semantics & Pragmatics. The paper, whose abstract is below, identifies challenges with a proposal to replace the Gricean view that speakers expect each other to share as much information as the can, with the view that they try to direct attention to as many possibilities as they can. 

As a puzzle for the Gricean view of exhaustification, Fox (2014) describes a game show scenario where the maxim of Quantity is arguably canceled, but the use of a disjunctive sentence still invites an exclusivity inference. Westera (2022) proposes that this puzzle can be solved in an Attentional Pragmatics, where the Gricean maxims are supplemented with Attention-maxims. In this commentary, we identify a gap in Westera’s solution and propose two possible amendments. We point out that under either amendment, the resulting proposal requires a departure from Grice’s original view of exhaustification as arising from a clash between the maxims of Quantity and Quality.