In your dreams: Flouting Quality II

• Denials like “In your dreams” differ from ordinary, affirmative uses of the same words.
• Locations involved are inaccessible, so speakers flout Quality Maxim II (evidence).
• Quality II flouting explains the implicated denials and their unusual behavior in a principled way.
• Quality II flouting is rare, but we can flout any maxim to implicate that maxim's earlier violation.
• Implicature and literal content swap roles: denial becomes at-issue; literal content, not.

Responses like in your dreams or on some other planet have a prominent reading (SDR) that strongly denies a Given proposition p. Since speakers have no evidence about the truth of p in inaccessible places like other peoples’ dreams, an SDR speaker provides an answer (‘p in your dreams’) to the Question Under Discussion (‘?p’) that is relatively weak in the conversational context. Assuming the SDR speaker's competence, such a weak response predictably gives rise to a conversational implicature that p is false, and focus-marking makes this negative implicature more salient. This article gives a unified pragmatic account of the previously unstudied syntactic/semantic and discourse-function properties that distinguish SDRs from other utterances with similar negative implicatures and focus: the peculiar strength of their denials, their obligatory focus-marking, their resistance to clefting, only, but, definite reference and embedding, and the displacement, by the denial implicature they engender, of their propositional content. This leaves the propositional content to contribute only Relevance implicatures. It is argued that SDRs speakers’ flouting of the second, evidence part of Grice's Quality Maxim is responsible for all these properties, even though such Quality II flouting is unusual because evidenceless claims are predominantly also irrelevant ones.