Language comprehension involves not only constructing the literal meaning of a sentence but also going beyond the literal meaning to infer what was meant but not said. One widely-studied test case is scalar implicature: The inference that, e.g., Sally ate some of the cookies implies she did not eat all of them. Research is mixed on whether this is due to a rote, grammaticalized procedure or ins...

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...

The information structure categories of Contrastive Topic and Contrastive Focus are examined to see their crucial roles in polarity and (conventional) implicature generation and implicature suspension and their respective correlatins with PA and SN conjunctions on one hand and descriptive (denotational) negation and metalinguistic negation on the other. The underlying notion of concessivity inv...

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By contrast, the global implicature in (1c), though entailed by (1b), does not have a similar corresponding implicature of the embedded clause when it appears unembedded. For this reason, the local/global distinction is relevant only in complex sentences. In simplex sentence such as (2a) the local and global implicatures are one and the same. The fact that (1a) has the local implicature in (1b)...

In a typical conversation, Speakers are assumed to be committed to the content of their utterances. Recent research has uncovered several linguistic expressions or prosodic contours that convey subtle interactions between the commitments of discourse agents and the presumed source of the information. Another such case is that of Transparent Free Relatives, as in That’s an instance of what pragm...

In his recent paper on the symmetry problem Roni Katzir argues that “the only relevant factor” for the calculation of any Quantity implicature “is structure” (, ). My rst aim here is to refute Katzir by providing three examples that show that structural complexity is irrelevant to the calculation of some Quantity implicatures. My second aim is to cast doubt on the advisability of assumin...