ABSTRACT

This chapter expands on the current literature on pragmatics, specifically on conventional implicatures by analyzing a construction from Puerto Rican Spanish. I look specifically at the construction y tó “and all,” the reduced version of y todo “and all,” which is commonly used to signal unexpectedness. I propose that the unexpectedness conveyed by y tó is a conventional implicature. Conventional implicatures have a set of properties, such as non-cancellability, which can be used to diagnose an implicature of this type. Along with other properties, I provide evidence showing that y tó behaves like a conventional implicature and thus it can be analyzed as such.