Some effort for some: Further evidence that scalar implicatures are effortful

Scalar implicatures in language acquisition: Some evidence from Modern Greek

Are Scalar Implicatures Computed Online?

Since Horn (1972) the notion of conversational implicature proposed by Grice has been put to use to explain certain interpretive differences between expressions in natural language and their counterparts in formal logic. For example, the sentences in (1) seem to convey more than they would be expected to if the natural language disjunction or had the same meaning as the logical disjunction∨, or...

Experimental Evidence for Embedded Scalar Implicatures

Scalar implicatures are traditionally viewed as pragmatic inferences which result from a reasoning about speakers’ communicative intentions (Grice 1989). This view has been challenged in recent years by theories which propose that scalar implicatures are a grammatical phenomenon. Such theories claim that scalar implicatures can be computed in embedded positions and enter into the recursive comp...

Young children understand some implicatures

Various recent studies have claimed that children have difficulty using contrastive stress in language comprehension (Solan, 1980; Gualmini et al., 2003; McDaniel et al., 1992; Reinhart, 1999, 2004) and that failure to access alternatives generated by focus may create problems for interpreting sentences with only (Paterson et al., 2003). Other researchers have shown that children also have diff...

Effortful Pragmatics: The Demanding Nature of Implicatures

In the present study we introduce dual task methodology to test opposing psychological processing predictions concerning the nature of implicatures in pragmatic theories. Implicatures routinely arise in human communication when hearers interpret utterances pragmatically and go beyond the logical meaning of the terms. The neo-Gricean view (e.g., Levinson, 2000) assumes that implicatures are gene...