Abstract

Semantics has typically focused on idealized cooperative conversation, where every assertion contributes to a lofty shared truth-seeking endeavor in order to establish a common ground of shared beliefs between speaker and hearer. However, since the phenomena like the above all run counter to this idea, their explanation is usually left to pragmatics, philosophy, or literary theory. And while Grice-s other maxims have gained a lot of attention and sparked entire research traditions (quantity implicatures, relevance theory, Horn-s division of pragmatic labor and Levinson-s M-principle), the role of the quality maxim remained a bit underexplored in linguistic semantics and pragmatics.