Indirect answers and cooperation: On Asher and Lascarides’s ‘Making the right commitments in dialogue’

University of Michigan Linguistics & Philosophy

Workshop on Implicatures

Christopher Potts

UMass Amherst

Abstract This commentary argues that linguistic cooperation is essential even

in discourse situations in which the nonlinguistic preferences of the participants

are misaligned. The central examples involve indirect answers to direct questions.

3 Indirect answers and non-cognitive IQAP

My empirical focus is on question–answer pairs in which the answer is semantically

(but not pragmatically) unrelated to the question.

for the rest of the paper: http://www.stanford.edu/~cgpotts/commentaries/potts-umich08-cmts-on-asher-lascarides.pdf