Concession and Linguistic Inference

Concession and Linguistic Inference Yong-Beom Kim Kwangwoon University 447-1 Wolgye-dong, Nowon-ku Seoul, Korea ybkim@daisy.gwu.ac.kr Abstract In this paper it has been proposed that concession should be analysed as involving scalar implicatures and that an alternative set of situations have to be assumed to account for the the relative nature of likelihood of event occurrence. This paper also claims that the notion of likelihood is the basis of the corresponding pragmatic inference and a universal quantification effect. Unexpectedness, which is conceptually tied to concession, on the other hand involves the same kind of pragmatic inference but presuppose the existence of an alternative set of individuals instead of an alternative set of situations. 1. Introduction This paper attempts to explain linguistic inference processes involving concession and unexpectedness. Concession and unexpectedness are claimed to be important semantic contents of English even and Korean –(la)to. In this paper, the notion concession will be approached from discourse or cognitive perspectives as well as from formal perspectives. I will review some of the claims made by a few authors involving concession in section 2. The intuitive discussions of different semantic levels and semantic relations involving concession will be the background of the formal treatment of the topic in the ensuing sections. This paper will adopt Crevels' (2000) categorization of different levels of concessive meanings, but will reject Konig's (1998) claim that concessive constructions implicates a presuppositional contents. Many formal proposals regarding even in English and -(la)to in Korean posits the scalar implicature approach following Fauconnier (1975) as in Bennet (1982) and Kim (2001). This paper will benefit form the discussions in these papers. 2. Previous studies In this section, some of the previous analyses are reviewed. Carevel's (2000) taxonomy of concession clauses will be reviewed in Section 2.1. Konig's (1998) and Bennet's (1982) analyses will be briefly reviewed. Some problems of both Konig's and Bennet's will be pointed out in Section 2.2 and Section 2.3, respectively. 2.1. Cognitive oriented categorization Crevels (2000) posits four different levels of concessive meanings as shown in (1) (1) a. Although it is raining, we're going for a walk. b. He's not at home, although his car is parked in front of the house. c. Even though I am call a bit late, what are your plans for this evening? d. I speak and write Serbian, Albanian, Turkish and Dutch, but I cannot sepress my true feelings in any other language than Romani. Although, now that I come to think of it, I have done it many times ...� (Crevels 2000: 317) 187 (la) is an example of content concession which relates phenomena involving the physical world domain. The raining and walking events are physically realized in the real world. On the other hand (lb) shows epistemic relationship that relates the speaker's premise and a conflicting conclusion. Although the two events [his being not at home] and [his car parking] are real world events, there is a difference between (la) and (lb) in the relations of the two subevents. In (1c) …

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