Further Discussion On Scalar Implicatures From Syntactic View

Since Grice first proposed Conversational Implicature in 1976, there have been many further discussions on the topic. The most famous scholars researching on Conversational Implicature are Leech, Gazdar, Atlas, Sperber, Wilson, Horn and Levinson. Building on Grice's four maxims of cooperative principle, Gazdar's general account of scalar implicatures and Horn's scale, Levinson (1983) proposed his three principles of conversational implicature, which are called "Neo-Griceanism".Different from Grice's four maxims, Levinson's three principles focus on conventional implicature. Levinson believes of the three principles the quantity principle is the most important, and he has discussed more on this principle. The scalar implicature discussed in this paper is almost the same as Levinson's scalar quantity implicature.Most of the researches on SIs (scalar implicatures) in China are mainly about analyzing simple conversations with scalar quantity principle. Professor Xu Shenghuan has published quite a few papers on this topic. His major contribution lies in two aspects: one is his detailed illustration and expansion of scalar implicature inference mechanism; the other is his clear explanation of the circumstances inducing the operation of scalar implicature. However, we find that Professor Xu's discussion is confined to the explanation of scalar implicatures of simple sentences by means of scalar quantity principle. He didn't consider the relation between scalar implicature and sentence structure, nor did he take into consideration the acceptability of logical entailing in real language use.Very recently, there have emerged some studies in the West on children's acquisition of SIs, and there are also some papers concerning SIs and sentence structure. But these studies are not systematic enough. This thesis, however, aims at analyzing SIs from syntactic view, attempting to find an applicable mechanism for computing SIs of complex sentences with more than one scalar item.It is found that, when computing the scalar implicature of a complex sentence with more than one scalar item, if still applying the scalar quantity principle, we may get...