Recent experimental evidence suggests that adults incorporate speaker knowledge into the derivation of pragmatic implicatures. Developmental studies report that 5-year-old children also succeed in taking speaker knowledge into account in implicature computation, but 4-year-olds fail. The present study investigated the pragmatic competence of 4year-olds, specifically the ability to incorporate s...

For the purposes of this note, I will assume that the Gricean account of scalar implicature is correct. I admit that I don’t have any qualms about making this assumption, since as far as I can tell, the Gricean account is the only game in town. But I thought I should mention it. With this preliminary out of the way, let us proceed to the problem area, and start by considering the following exam...

On one view of dialogue, the conversational record is part of the COMMON GROUND of the conversants. As conversants make assertions, the content of these assertions are added to the common ground, with the effect of limiting the context set (Stalnaker, 1978; Gazdar, 1979). According to Stalnaker, an assertion is assumed to be ACCEPTED, with a concomitant limitation of shared context, unless it i...

The explicature/implicature distinction is one manifestation of the distinction between the explicit content of an utterance and its implicit import. On certain ‘minimalist’ approaches, the explicit/implicit distinction is equated with the semantics/pragmatics distinction or with Paul Grice’s saying/implicating distinction. However, the concept of ‘explicature’, which belongs to the relevance-t...

The standard position in pragmatics to date has been that cancellability is useful way of differentiating implicatures from logical implications, semantic entailments and the like. In recent years, however, there has been considerable debate as to whether implicatures are in fact always cancellable, or indeed whether they are cancellable at all, amongst linguistic pragmaticians and language phi...

If a speaker tells us that “some guests were late to the party,” we typically infer that not all were. Implicatures, in which an ambiguous statement (“some and possibly all”) is strengthened pragmatically (to “some and not all”), are a paradigm case of pragmatic reasoning. Inferences of this sort are difficult for young children, but recent work suggests that this mismatch may stem from issues ...

In multi-party interactions humans use available communication modes in predictable ways. For example, the dialogue theories of Conversational Implicature (Grice 1975) and Giveness Theory (Gundel, Hedberg et al. 1993) have both been applied successfully in the analysis of multi-party, multimodal settings (Chai, Prasov et al. 2005). At times people use multiple modes of communication in compleme...

Abstract The author argues that there is no such thing as a unique and general taxonomy of non-at-issue contents. Accordingly, we ought to shun large categories “conventional implicature” (Grice), “F-implicature” (Horn), “ CI ” (Potts), “Class B” (Tonhauser, Beaver, Roberts & Simons) or the like. As an alternative, may, first, describe “semantic profile” linguistic devices accurately possib...

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new type of NPI licensing context through French subjunctive and ne explétif. The distribution of NPIs on previous studies does not exactly correspond to negative function types. French subjunctive and ne expletif are good guidelines for reclassifying NPI licensing context. My classification is by a hierarchy of strength in negative force: overtly negat...