ENG302 -- Topic: Semantics and Pragmatics - Assignment 9 James Madison University

Instructions: [Your answers to this assignment should be written out clearly (or typed :) ). As an "ungraded" assignment, your work will be collected but will be marked only as an acceptable or unacceptable effort.]

1. Find an example (preferably one you hear or read; they happen all the time) in which an apparent violation (a flouting) of the maxim of relevance leads to an implicature. Describe the example and the implicature, and speculate on why the speaker might have chosen to flout the maxim.
2. Practice with Presuppositions and the Inheritance Tests -- Choose any 10 sentences you come across that contain a presupposition (most do), describe the presupposition in each, and do one of the inheritance tests on each to demonstrate that it is a presupposition, not an entailment.
3. Find or create just one example relevant to the projection problem for presupposition, i.e., an example in which what might be a presupposition does not hold in that linguistic context.
4. Briefly consider the idea of "speaker's meaning" in Chapter One of the Portner text. Does it seem to have anything in common with Speech Act Theory? Try to charcterize briefly how the particular examples discussed here differ from the kind of examples we've been looking at to understand Speech Act Theory.