Languages vary systematically in how semantic information is “packaged” verbs and verb-related constructions. Mandarin Chinese contrasts typologically with English its lexicalization of state change. Most monomorphemic are moot about or imply a change, whereas many (e.g., kill, break) entail the fulfillment Recent studies suggest that form continuum strength state-change implicature. State-chan...

106 one c a n m e c h a n i c a l l y b u i l d r e c o g n i z e r s and r a n d o ~ g e n e r a t o r s . But s u c h m a c h i n e s a r e n o t t h e g r a ~ a r s , and a r e c o g n i z e r i s m a n i f e s t l y n o t t h e same m a c h i n e a s a g e n e r a t o r , even t h o u g h t h e same g rammar may u n d e r l i e both. S u p p o s e v e r e p h r a s e t h e q u e s t i o n a...

Successful communication regularly requires listeners to make pragmatic inferences — enrichments beyond the literal meaning of a speaker’s utterance. For example, when interpreting a sentence such as “Alice ate some of the cookies,” listeners routinely infer that Alice did not eat all of them. A Gricean account of this phenomenon assumes the presence of alternatives (like “all of the cookies”) ...

Three experiments investigated the processing of the implicature associated with some using a "gumball paradigm." On each trial, participants saw an image of a gumball machine with an upper chamber with 13 gumballs and an empty lower chamber. Gumballs then dropped to the lower chamber and participants evaluated statements, such as "You got some of the gumballs." Experiment 1 established that so...

I present an analysis of the instrumental elements with and use, as in Betty cut the cake with a knife. A variety of evidence indicates that with and use do not make the same semantic contribution, casting doubt on the theory that these elements introduce the thematic role Instrument. For use, I adopt the analysis in Rissman (to appear): use expresses modal, goal-related content. For with, a mo...

Dual process theories suggest that our thinking is determined by separate, but interacting, heuristic and analytic processes. We describe an experiment designed to investigate the development of these processes. We examined the extent to which groups of 6, 9, 12, and 15 year-old participants and a group of adults were sensitive to scalar implicature in pragmatically enriched and pragmatically i...