1. I agree with Grice's general interpretation of general implicature. Depending on how the spearker intends the utterance to be interpreted does play a big impact on how that message is received. IF you say "Well he's a nice guy" vs "Well he's a nice guy" in a certain way you could either intend to convey the literal meaning or sarcasm, implying you don't think he is a nice guy. The speaker must assume thaht the person will understand that the conversation implicates the proposition y.
2. I am not quite sure I fully support his point about scalar implicature. Basically, if you say "some students got an A" when in fact all students got an a you are implying that some did not get all A's, then you aren't wrong but you're still leading someone to believe that not everybody got an A. I think that this can be challenged based on conversational context - someone might ask "how many people?" Also, the speaker may not intend to imply some people did not get A's unlike the stated above when the speaker and receiver are on the same page (presumably).
3. My objection for Grice is how he distinguishes the meaning of an implicature based on whether we are looking from the speakers intention, the receiver's interpretation, or nay combination of the two. He seems to combine and overlook this distinction a bit.
Interesting comments! I agree with you about what you state in the first paragraph. I can still recall when I was in elementary school, we had a practice in Chinese class (since I was in China) to see how many possible different meanings some simple sentence can deliver (sometimes by stressing certain words, sometimes by change the tone, and sometimes just by the way different listeners think). I would not completely agree with the example you give in the second paragraph though. I don't think it only depends on the conversational text, but also depends on people who hear this sentence. To me, "some students got an A" doesn't suggest some didn't get one. Instead, it could suggest, to me, 1.) it is not the case nobody got A (which includes the possibility all students got A); 2.) depending on the tone of voice if the sentence above is spoken, it is also possible the speaker is just not confident of what he/she is talking about by using some. As a person who always tries to be as logically perfect as possibly, I almost never use words like "all" or "none" when stating a fact, and this rule is also suggested to all academicians as I believe. So sometimes "some" can deliver a similar confidence level as "all" in certain cases. So, if anybody thinks there is definitely someone not getting A and thus the sentence is problematic, I will be the one who stands up and say, "well, he/she didn't say anything like that". If that person believes in logic and is capable to understand it, eventually I would persuade him/her, and he/she would realize that there is no problem with the sentence but his/her false logic.
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