Conventional implicature is conventional in the sense that it is a function of linguistic meaning and context in the way that truth-conditional content is. Nevertheless, although conventional in this sense it makes no contribution to truth-conditions. Rather it introduces a pragmatic presupposition. The delivery of content in implicature is in the mode of the unsaid. How exactly we should under...

for Part I and Part II) There has been a recent ‘experimental turn’ in the study of scalar implicature, yielding important results concerning online processing and acquisition. This paper highlights some of these results and places them in the current theoretical context. We argue that there is sometimes a mismatch between theoretical and experimental studies, and we point out how some of these...

Standard implementations of Grice’s theory of conversational implicature assume that the derivation an implicature always begins with a single proposition expressed by means of a sentence in a given context. Against this received view, I argue that, in at least three ways, implicatures are discourse-based rather than proposition-based. First, in some cases an implicature can only be derived fro...

Standard semantic accounts of the equative ascribe it an ‘at least’ meaning, deriving an ‘exactly’ reading when necessary via scalar implicature. I argue for a particular formulation of this scalar implicature account which considers that (i) equatives license NPIs in their internal arguments, and (ii) equatives whose internal arguments are measure phrases (MPs) are, in contrast to clausal equa...

Scalar Implicatures are pragmatic inferences that are normally derived in conversational exchanges when a scalar term, such as for example “or”, is used. Different theoretical accounts have been proposed to describe how and at which point in the derivation we actually add this inference. Large part of the most recent debate is focused on the question of the “cost” of implicature computation, an...

Experimental evidence on embedded implicatures by Chemla (2009b) and Geurts & Pouscoulous (2009a) has fewer theoretical consequences than assumed: On the one hand, the evidence successfully argues against obligatory local implicature computation, which has however already been discredited. On the other hand, the data are fully consistent with optional local implicature computation.

Most theoretical as well as empirical work regarding the scalar implicature not all of the quantifier some has focused on the controversy of whether this implicature is generated by default or based on context. Independently of this question, it can be also asked whether this scalar implicature contributes to the truth-conditional content of sentences. We present results of an ERP study which t...

A central challenge for all theories of conversational implicature (Grice, 1957, 1975) is characterizing the fundamental tension between Quantity (Q) implicature, in which utterance meaning is refined through exclusion of the meanings of alternative utterances, and Informativeness (I ) implicature, in which utterance meaning is refined by strengthening to the prototypical case (Atlas & Levinson...