The Extended Theory Of Scalar Implicatures And Its Applications

As one type of conversational implicature, scalar implicature is traditionally assumed to arise when a speaker, by expressing a less informative proposition, is taken to communicate the negation of a more informative proposition. The subject of scalar implicature has been discussed at length in the linguistic-pragmatic literature, especially in the Neo-Gricean community (Horn 1973; Levinson 1983, 2000) and the Post-Gricean community (Sperber & Wilson 1985, 1996; Carston 1990, 1998, 2002). The former believes that the implicature to deny the stronger term in the scale arises automatically as a "default" or "preferred" meaning; while the latter assumes that scalar implicatures are particularized, context-dependent conversational inferences, not steadfastly linked to the words that could prompt them.There is no reason to deny that scalar implicatures in the previous studies actually are scalar quantity implicatures, a special case of the extended scalar implicatures. It is demonstrated that scalar implicatures cannot be adequately defined in terms of scalar quantity implicatures. Rather, the scope of scales and scalar implicatures should be broadened because the world we are living in is composed of various substances ranked along different scales.This dissertation aims to come up with an extended theory of scalar implicatures which are derived from and elaborated on the traditional one, and to explore the applications of this new insight to the interpretation of scalar phenomena. It covers the ground of a variety of scalar implicatures which are trigged either by polarity items at the lexical level, by scalar operators at the discourse level, or by hyperbolic metaphors at the rhetorical level. Therefore, the focus of the current study is to provide a description of the extended version of the scalar implicatures theory in contrast with the traditional one. Based on the theoretical notions such as conceptual scales, scalar models, we discover four basic inferencing logic for deriving scalar implicatures.The next goal of this dissertation is to demonstrate in detail how the extended theory of scalar implicatures can be applied to the interpretation of the distribution of polarity items, the discourse function of scalar operators, and the rhetorical force of hyperbolic metaphors respectively. More specifically, the analyses of the representation of scalar...