Continuation-based semantics for Conventional Implicatures: The case of Japanese benefactives

This paper proposes a novel, fully compositional analysis of conventional implicatures (CIs) (in the sense of Potts (2005)) in terms of the technique of continuations (Barker 2002, 2004). The paper has both an empirical and a theoretical goal. The empirical goal is to point out the existence of phenomena (including the Japanese benefactive predicate morau) in which a certain expression contributes meanings both at the level of ordinary assertion and at the level of CIs. Such cases are predicted to be nonexistent in natural language by an influential theory of CIs developed by Potts (2005). The theoretical goal is to propose an alternative formal treatment of CIs that overcomes this empirical shortcoming of Potts’s theory. As we will show below, by employing the technique of continuations, a theoretically simpler treatment of CIs becomes possible, which simultaneously overcomes the above empirical problem of Potts’s original formulation of CI logic.