Conversational Implicatures Robert

According to standard pragmat-ics, we should account for conver-sational implicatures in terms of Grice's (1975) maxims of conversa-tion. Neo-Griceans like Atlas & Levinson (1981) and Horn (1984) seek to reduce those maxims to the so-called Q and I-principles. In this paper I want to argue that (i) there are major problems for reduc-ing Gricean pragmatics to these two principles, and (ii) that, in fact, we'd better account for implicatures in terms of the principles of (a) opti-mal relevance and (b) optimal cod-ing. To formulate both, I will make use of Shannon's (1948) mathemat-ical theory of communication.