Conversational Implicature and Lexical Pragmatics

Lexical Pragmatics is a research field that tries to give a systematic and explanatory account of a number of pragmatic phenomena that are connected with the semantic underspecification of lexical items. The approach combines a constraint-based semantics with a Gricean mechanism of pragmatics. The basic pragmatic mechanism rests on conditions of updating the common ground and allows to give a precise explication of notions as (generalized) conversational implicatures and pragmatic anomaly. The integrating and unifying character of the basic account is demonstrated by solving some puzzles with regard to Atlas & Levinson’s Qand I-principles, Horn’s division of pragmatic labor, etc. The basic mechanism is then extended by an abductive reasoning system (guided by subjective probability) and it is illustrated how this framework can be used to solve Quine’s riddles concerning the pragmatics of