Semantics circle: Why am I saying this? Sensible and informative contributions to discourse

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Abstract

Cooperative communication is taken to involve an expectation about the appropriate amount of information that a speaker should convey.  This talk presents a series of psycholinguistic studies addressing (i) the prohibition against saying too much and (ii) cases where a speaker's apparent violation of this expectation permits the inference of additional meaning. The results show that speakers do indeed favor informative content that is not otherwise inferable from the situation.  In turn, when a speaker opts to include unasked-for or uninformative content (e.g., a trivial observation, a well-intentioned reminder), their language can convey additional information --- information that may not have been intended by the speaker in the first place.