The philosophy papers blog is up, 24 hours or more late and with all the entries being by semanticists. One of the entries, Christopher Potts’s dissertation on conventional implicature, looks particularly exciting. (It was even more exciting when Kai von Fintel announced it was up.) Potts argues that some terms do carry conventional implicatures, but but, therefore and most of the terms which you usually suspect of having conventional implicatures are not amongst them. The main examples he uses are terms with ‘expressive’ content. I remember Stephen Barker arguing for something like this about moral terms and conventional implicature a few years ago, but I can’t find a reference to that online somewhere.

All of you who are struggling to write up a dissertation probably shouldn’t read the first paragraph of Potts’s dissertation. He says that the dissertation grew out of a discussion in a seminar in Spring 2002. That’s not much over 12 months ago, and the dissertation is 330 pages long!