Salient inferences: Pragmatics and The Inheritors

The why and how of experimental pragmatics: The case of ‘scalar inferences’

Learning through pragmatics 1 Children’s pragmatic inferences as a route for learning about the world

This study investigated whether children can infer category properties based on how a speaker describes an individual (e.g., saying something is a “small zib” implies that zibs are generally bigger than this one). Threeto five-year-olds (N=264) from a university preschool and a children’s museum were tested on their ability to make this sort of contrast inference. Four-year-olds made some infer...

Inferences on the Generalized Variance under Normality

Generalized variance is applied for determination of dispersion in a multivariate population and is a successful measure for concentration of multivariate data. In this article, we consider constructing confidence interval and testing the hypotheses about generalized variance in a multivariate normal distribution and give a computational approach. Simulation studies are performed to compare thi...

Experimental Pragmatics: Towards Testing Relevance-Based Predictions about Anaphoric Bridging Inferences

Critics of relevance theory have charged that relevance theory provides no testable predictions, hence is unfalsifiable. This paper is an attempt to identify some testable relevance-theoretic predictions about anaphoric bridging inferences, and to show possible ways of testing these predictions. A relevance-based model of utterance interpretation is compared with Levinson’s GCI model, and their...

Pragmatics and the Lexicon

This contribution investigates the interactions between the (mental) lexicon and pragmatics. It aims to give an overview about pragmatic phenomena that are connected with the semantic underspecification of lexical items. Cases in point are the pragmatics of adjectives, effects of negative strengthening, systematic polysemy, the distribution of lexical and productive causatives, blocking phenome...