The meaning of but: A procedural reanalysis

Abstract

Discourse connectives such as but, while obviously meaningful, are widely seen as not affecting the truth conditions of the utterances they occur in. One way of explaining this is to analyse them as encoding procedural constraints on implicatures. I’ll summarize the arguments for a procedural account, and look at a recent objection (Bach 1999), according to which but does contribute a constituent to a truth-conditional conceptual representation. Then I’ll consider the procedural analyses of Blakemore (1987, 2002) and Iten (2000), on which but encodes an instruction to process the clause that follows as contradicting and eliminating an assumption. I’ll propose instead that but indicates that the hearer is to suspend an inference that would result in a contradiction with what follows, so diverts him from a conclusion that he could potentially have drawn. Finally, I’ll show how the various interpretations of utterances containing but are derived.

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