Pragmatic aspects of implicit comparison: An economy-based approach

There are two ways to express comparison: implicit comparison (e.g. Compared to Tom, Jim is tall.) and explicit comparison (e.g. Jim is taller than Tom.) (Sapir, 1944; Kennedy, in press). Although implicit comparison and explicit comparison can both be used to express comparison, they have different pragmatic properties. In these examples, the former, but not the latter, implies (a) Tom is not tall and (b) Jim is not definitely tall (possibly borderline). This paper investigates the pragmatic aspects of implicit comparison cross-linguistically (i.e. English and Japanese), considering (1) how it is pragmatically different from explicit comparison, (2) the status of the two implicatures, and (3) how they arise.There are two approaches to explain the implicatures in implicit comparison: a symmetrical (or economy-based) approach, and an asymmetrical (or dependency) approach. In the symmetrical approach, the two implicatures are viewed as deriving from a single processing principle of economy. Under the asymmetrical approach, the implicature in (b) depends on the implicature in (a). I argue that the symmetrical approach is preferable.Since the economy principle is neither stored in a particular lexicon, nor is it a co-operative principle, the implicatures have to be regarded as belonging to a third type of implicature: ‘computational implicature.’