On Schema Inference And Implicature Interpretation

Grice's four principles have been reduced to Levinson's three principles, then to Horn's two principles and eventually to Sperber and Wilson's single principle of Relevance. These researches in implicatures have yielded valuable insights in this area, but the principles may be either too complex or too general. Furthermore, they may fall short of formalized inference and satisfactory account for the immediate inference. To explore the solution to these problems, in this paper, Gentner's SME, Lakoff & Johnson's image schemas, and Fauconnier & Turner's CI theory are incorporated into the above principles from the aspect of schema inference. The schema inference is exploited to provide formalism for implicature recovery. The basic schemas are CENTER-PERIPHERY SCHEMA, PART-WHOLE SCHEMA and GENERIC-SPECIFIC SCHEMA. In correspondence with these schemas, three principles are utilized. They are the resemble principle, the metonymy principle and the topology principle. These basic schemas and the three principles may shed light on the interpretation of the general principle of optimal relevance. The CENTER-PERIPHERY SCHEMA and the resemble principle can account for the principle of quality, quantity and manner which can be regarded as the sub-principle of relevance. These schemas and principles are employed to analyze the mechanism of the generation and recovery of implicatures within a domain and across domains. In intra-domain interaction, the resemblance principle and metonymy principle are mainly used in virtue of schema deduction. In inter-domain communication, schema induction plays the major role in inference from an analogical schema. In the case of inference from an emergent schema, abduction in combination of deduction, induction and beliefs will achieve the communicative purposes when an emergent schema is composed, completed and elaborated by interlocutors.