Whilst it may seem strange to ask to whom “I” refers, we show that there are occasions when it is not always obvious. In demonstrating this we challenge Kaplan’s assumption that the utterer, agent and referent of “I” are always the same person. We begin by presenting what we regard to be the received view about indexical reference popularized by David Kaplan in his influential 1972 “Demonstrati...

Making inferences beyond the literal meaning of sentences occurs with certain scalar expressions via scalar implicatures. For example, adults usually interpret some as some but not all. On the basis of behavioral research, it has been suggested that processing implicatures is cognitively costly. However, many studies have used cases where sentences with some did not match the context in which t...

An implicature i that arises from an utterance U is cancelable if U is consistent with not i. If i is a cancelable implicature, then it is a conversational implicature. However, some particularized conversational implicatures (PCIs) cannot straightforwardly be canceled. Imagine that Mr. X is applying for a philosophy position and his teacher is writing him the following letter of recommendation:

The notion of implicature was first introduced by Grice (1967, 1989), who defined it essentially as what is communicated less what is said. This definition contributed in part to the proliferation of a large number of different species of implicature by neo-Griceans. Relevance theorists have responded to this by proposing a shift back to the distinction between explicit and implicit meaning (co...

Linguistic communication relies on pragmatic implicatures such as the inference that if “some students passed the test,” not all did. Yet young children perform poorly on tests of implicature, especially scalar implicatures using “some” and “all,” until quite late in development. We investigate the origins of scalar implicature using tasks in which the scale arises from real-world context rathe...

Analogical counterfactuals such as “If I were you, I would do so and so...” create a puzzle for philosophical semantics. Whereas the ‘received view’ in philosophical semantics has it that the first person pronoun always refers to its utterer, one may wonder whether this is still the case when the first person pronoun is embedded in analogical counterfactuals such as (2) “If I were you, I would ...

This paper introduces Paul Grice’s notion of conversational implicature. The basic ideas — the cooperative principle, the maxims of conversation, and the contrast between implicature and presupposition — make it clear that conversational implicature is a highly contextualized form of language use that has a lot in common with non-linguistic behavior. But what exactly is its role? We invite the ...

All versions of Grice’s theory utterer meaning couch success in terms stressing the hearer’s ability to recognize what is intended. This ties naturally cooperative principle and maxims conversation. A later additional maxim manner emphasizes that one should always facility audience’s response one’s communication. Meaning communication successful with right “uptake”, whether seen desires or beli...

The notion of implicature is not precisely defined, and may be compared to a concept with prototypical and peripheral instances. A prototypical implicature is a particularized conversational implicature as first proposed by Grice (1975), in which the implicature is intended by the speaker, dependent on the particular context of utterance, and calculated by identifiable inferential steps, includ...