In addition to introducing the very successful product line of conversational implicatures, Paul Grice and his successors have assembled an arguably inchoate class of phenomena under the trade name of CONVENTIONAL IMPLICATURE, whose reception in the scholarly marketplace has been somewhat bridled. A conventional implicature associated with expression E is a non-cancelable contribution to the co...

Most theories of implicature make reference to a notion of alternatives. Interlocutors reason about what the speaker could have said. In this paper, I investigate the structure of these alternatives. In particular, I ask how these alternative utterances are constrained by the interlocutors’ grammar. I argue that in order to derive certain implicatures, alternative utterances must be analyzed li...

Scalar implicature has served as a test case for exploring the relations between semantic and pragmatic processes during language comprehension. Most studies have used reaction time methods and the results have been variable. In these studies, we use the visual-world paradigm to investigate implicature. We recorded participants' eye movements during commands like "Point to the girl that has som...

The Gricean theory of conversational implicature has always been plagued by data suggesting that what would seem to be conversational inferences may occur within the scope of operators like believe, for example; which for bona fide implicatures should be an impossibility. Concentrating my attention on scalar implicatures, I argue that, for the most part, such observations can be accounted for w...

As Grice defined it, a speaker conversationally implicates that p only if the speaker expects the hearer to recognize that the speaker thinks that p. This paper argues that in the sorts of cases that Grice took as paradigmatic examples of conversational implicature there is in fact no need for the hearer to consider what the speaker might thus have in mind. Instead, the hearer might simply make...

Traditional question answering systems adopt the following framework: parsing questions, searching for relevant documents, and identifying/generating answers. However, this framework does not work well for questions with hidden assumptions and implicatures. In this paper, we describe a novel idea, a cascading guidance strategy, which can not only identify potential traps in questions but furthe...

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 p...

This study evaluates the comprehension of generalized conversational implicatures (GCI) in children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD), using a GCI test constructed based on the Levinson model, which distinguishes between three types of implicatures: type Q (or scalar: "what is not referred to does not occur"); type I ("by default, it is not necessary to say what can be assumed"); ...

(1) is a counterfactual conditional. Utterances of counterfactual conditionals are typically accompanied by the information that their antecedents are false. But what is the source of that information? Two arguments show that this information is neither an entailment nor a presupposition of the counterfactual. First, counterfactual conditionals can be used to argue for the falsity of their ante...

We introduce a corpus of 7,032 sentences rated by human annotators for formality, informativeness, and implicature on a 1-7 scale. The corpus was annotated using Amazon Mechanical Turk.1 Reliability in the obtained judgments was examined by comparing mean ratings across two MTurk experiments, and correlation with pilot annotations (on sentence formality) conducted in a more controlled setting. ...