Conversationally Relevant Descriptions

CONVERSATIONALLY RELEVANT DESCRIPTIONS Amlchai Kronfeld Natural Language Incorporated 2910 Seventh St. Berkeley, CA 94710 i Abstract Conversationally relevant descriptions are definite descriptions that are not merely tools for the iden- tification of a referent, but are also crucial to the dis- course in other respects. I analyze the uses of such descriptions in assertions as conveying a particular ~ype of conversational implicatures. Such implics- tures can be represented within the framework of possible world semantics. The analysis is extended to non-assertive illocutionary acts on the one hand, and to indefinite descriptions on the other. 2 Introduction In an earlier paper [Kronfeld 1986 b I have intro- duced the distinction between/unctionagiy and con- versationally relevant descriptions. All uses of def- inite descriptions for the purpose of referring are functional in the sense that they are supposed to identify the referent. But some uses of definite de- scriptions exhibit a type of relevance (or irrelevance) that goes beyond identification purposes. Consider the following example. As part of his effort to re= cruit more young people into the police force, the mayor of New York proclaims in a public speech: 1 New York needs more policemen. Instead of gNew York" he might have used UThe Big Apple, s or ~The city by the Hudson, ~ or some such description. It would not do, however, to say that 2 The city with the world's largest Jewish community needs more policemen even though this description might be useful enough in identifying New York for the audience. It is sim- ply irrelevant in this context. On the other hand, 5O this same description might be quite relevant in a different context. For example, suppose the mayor were giving a speech at a reception in honor of Is- rael's Prime Minister. Under those circumstances, the statement $ The city with the world's largest Jewish community welcomes Israel's Prime Minister. would make perfect sense. The difference, of course, is in the relevance of the description to the state= ment in (3), and its irrelevance to the one in (2). Uses of definite descriptions such as illustrated in example (3), are what I call conversationally rele- vant. The distinction between functionally and conver- sationally relevant descriptions is part of a general model of referring that is based on what I have termed the dea4:riptlve approach to reference [Kron- reid 1990]. An ellucidation of the speech act of refer- ring cannot be complete without understanding the role of conversationally relevant descriptions in the larger discourse. My hypothesis in [Kronfeld 1086] was that conversationally relevant descriptions func- tion as part of implicatures of a particular type. The problem is to specify what this type is. An outline of a solution is the topic of the present paper. 3 Implicature Why should we think that whenever a conversation- ally relevant description is used an implicature al- ways exists? The reason for this has to do with the fact that discourse is something more than a simple sum of the isolated sentences that …

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