How Do Inferences Get Invited?

Abstract

In this paper 1 shall try to explicate the problem of invited inferences, although no final conclusive results can be presented at this early stage of the investigation. For. clarity and brevity's sake I shall concentrate on only one subclass of invited inferences, namely conditional perfection. Although Geis and Zwicky (1971) presented two more subclasses of invited inferences and Heringer (1971) claimed that Kartunnen's optional implicative verbs (e.g. remember (to) , choose(to)) are cases where these verbs invite the inference of their complements, conditional perfection is the only clear candidate for the notion of invited inferences and the controversy centered around this phenomenon. Thus we can safely assume that we are justified enough on our policy of investigating only part of the entire phenomenon.