Implicatures and discourse structure

In K. Manktelow, D. Over & S. Elqayam (eds), The Science of Reason: A Festschrift for Jonathan St. B. T. Evans (pp. 259-81), 2010

The past decade has seen a flurry of experimental work on the psychological basis of conversational implicature, focusing in particular on the questions of whether implicature processing is automatic or effortful and whether pragmatic interpretations develop before or after logical ones. This chapter reviews this work, assesses its significance, and sets it within a wider theoretical context. In particular, it draws attention to a theoretical option largely ignored in the experimental literature. Most experimental work on implicature has been conducted within a broadly Gricean paradigm, according to which implicatures can be calculated and explained using general psycho-social principles. However, there is an alternative strand in philosophy of language, according to which many implicatures depend on convention rather than inference. We argue that this view should not be ruled out and deserves experimental testing. The chapter also makes connections with the literature on dual-process theories of reasoning, as developed by Jonathan Evans and others. Superficially at least, implicature seems made for a dual-process analysis, and we consider if this is correct. The chapter closes with some suggestions for future experimental work.

Unpublished manuscript, 2008

Pragmatics (Vol.12, pp.117-134), 2002

The notion of implicature was first introduced by , 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 (corresponding to explicature and implicature respectively). However, they appear to have pared down the concept of implicature too much, ignoring phenomena which may be better treated as implicatures in their over-generalisation of the concept of explicature. These problems have their roots in the fact that explicit and implicit meaning intuitively overlap, and thus do not provide a suitable basis for distinguishing implicature from other types of pragmatic phenomena. An alternative conceptualisation of implicature based on the concept of implying with which Grice originally associated his notion of implicature is thus proposed. From this definition it emerges that implicature constitutes something else inferred by the addressee that is not literally said by the speaker. Instead, it is meant in addition to what the literally speaker says, and consequently, it is defeasible like all other types of pragmatic phenomena.

Linguistics in the Netherlands, 2009

In this article we present two sets of experiments designed to investigate the acquisition of scalar implicatures. Scalar implicatures arise in examples like Some professors are famous where the speaker's use of some typically indicates that s/he had reasons not to use a more informative term, e.g. all. Some professors are famous therefore gives rise to the implicature that not all professors are famous. Recent studies on the development of pragmatics suggest that preschool children are often insensitive to such implicatures when they interpret scalar terms (Cognition 78 raises two important questions: (a) are all scalar terms treated in the same way by young children?, and (b) does the child's difficulty reflect a genuine inability to derive scalar implicatures or is it due to demands imposed by the experimental task on an otherwise pragmatically savvy child? Experiment 1 addresses the first question by testing a group of 30 5-year-olds and 30 adults (all native speakers of Greek) on three different scales, koli, merikil (kall, somel), ktris, diol (kthree, twol) and kteliono, arxizol (kfinish, startl). In each case, subjects were presented with contexts which satisfied the semantic content of the stronger (i.e. more informative) terms on each scale (i.e. all, three and finish) but were described using the weaker terms of the scales (i.e. some, two, start). We found that, while adults overwhelmingly rejected these infelicitous descriptions, children almost never did so. Children also differed from adults in that their rejection rate on the numerical scale was reliably higher than on the two other scales. In order to address question (b), we trained a group of 30 5-yearolds to detect infelicitous statements. We then presented them with modified versions of the stories A. Papafragou, J. Musolino / Cognition 86 (2003) 253-282 253 Cognition 86 (2003) 253-282 www.elsevier.com/locate/cognit 0010-0277/02/$ -see front matter q (A. Papafragou).

Teorema, vol. XXVI, 2007

Semantics and pragmatics, 2010

Conventionalist theories of scalar implicature differ from other accounts in that they predict strengthening of embedded scalar terms. argue that experimental support for this prediction is largely based on sentence comprehension tasks that inflate the frequency with which terms like some are strengthened. Using a picture verification task, they observed no strengthening of embedded scalars. We present data from a multiple-choice picture verification task that is more sensitive to interpretation preferences, and find that readers do show a preference for strengthened interpretations even in embedded phrases. These data cast doubt on Geurts and Pouscoulous's empirical arguments against the existence of embedded implicatures.

Cognition, 2006

Recent research in semantics and pragmatics has revived the debate about whether there are two cognitively distinct categories of conversational implicatures: generalised and particularised. Generalised conversational implicatures are so-called because they seem ...

Game Theory and Pragmatics, 2006