Numerous meanings: The meaning of English cardinals and the legacy of Paul Grice

This dissertation is a corpus analysis of the meaning of English cardinal numerals in the light of Paul Grice's theory of implicature. The corpus data demonstrate that English cardinals are primarily used to express the “cardinality” or “numerosity” of the set of elements denoted by the NP that contains the numeral in question. In our analysis, we have investigated the specific interpretations of these cardinal uses in terms of the various values they can have. We have also concentrated on the influence of linguistic elements in the context on the interpretation of numerals. Furthermore, the corpus data show that “cardinality” not a binary feature. We have tried to determine the formal and functional characteristics of those uses that cannot be said to be fully cardinal. This can be linked to the more philosophical discussion concerning the ontological status of numbers.; The first part of the dissertation consists of two components: a critical evaluation of the (neo-)Gricean theory of conventional and non-conventional meaning and a discussion of the recent analyses of cardinals. The second part consists of the corpus analysis.; The problematic methodological foundation of implicature theory is considered to be one of the most important weaknesses of the neo-Gricean analysis of numerals. This analysis is based on the idea that a numeral n means ‘at least n’. The fact that this interpretation very often does not correspond to the everyday interpretation of numerals is explained through the concept of implicatures. Crucially, however, the neo-Gricean analysis does not offer an empirically based description of the conventional meaning of numerals. Also the influence of logic and the truth-conditional paradigm of meaning is felt to be problematic. Our decision to opt for a corpus analysis is a direct consequence of this methodological critique: corpus data allow us to determine the conventional meaning of numerals empirically. We have investigated the behavior of two in one thousand utterances and reached the conclusion that the neo-Gricean analysis underestimates the pluriformity of cardinals. In that analysis numerals are usually reduced to their (adnominal) cardinality function. Our corpus analysis shows that this function is indeed the most prominent one, but a semantic description of numerals cannot ignore the divergent uses.; The main part of the corpus analysis focuses on the neo-Gricean description of cardinals and formulates an alternative analysis on the basis of the corpus data, starting from the concept “absolute value”. The conventional meaning of a cardinal—the ‘absolute value’ meaning—is an indication of the cardinality of the set of elements denoted by the NP that contains the numeral. This differs from the three traditional positions (‘at least n’, ‘at most n’ and ‘exactly n’) in that the latter all have an epistemic component: a definition of the ‘at least’ meaning necessarily has to refer to the attitude of the speaker with respect to the expression of cardinality. An ‘at least’ use of a numeral is always also an indication of the fact that the language user wants to include the possibility of there being more than n elements. Also ‘at most n’ and ‘exactly n’ uses have this type of epistemic component. ‘Absolute value’ uses, however, do not.; It is important to emphasize that in our corpus analysis the meaning of a certain use of a numeral has always been determined on the basis of the whole utterance of which the numeral forms a part. We have called this the “comprehensive” analysis: if there happened to be linguistic material in the context that influences the interpretation directly or indirectly, this influence was only filtered out in a second stage. The comprehensive meaning analysis...