Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s Dilbert has the devious Wally flouting Grice’s maxim of Quantity:

(On Grice’s maxims, see this posting.) Saying “not two” implicates — conversationally implicates — not two or more, but Wally disregards this in favor of treating not two as ‘not exactly two’. But the pointy-headed boss has enough experience with Wally to suspect his deviousness.

This entry was posted on July 10, 2013 at 6:05 am and is filed under Implicature, Pragmatics, Semantics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.