Some implicatures reveal semantic differences

Young children understand some implicatures

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...

Context in Generalized Conversational Implicatures: The Case of Some

There is now general agreement about the optionality of scalar implicatures: the pragmatic interpretation will be accessed depending on the context relative to which the utterance is interpreted. The question, then, is what makes a context upper- (vs. lower-) bounding. Neo-Gricean accounts should predict that contexts including factual information will enhance the rate of pragmatic interpretati...

Scalar implicatures in language acquisition: Some evidence from Modern Greek

Conversational Implicatures

According to standard pragmatics, we should account for conversational implicatures in terms of Grice's (1975) maxims of conversation. Neo-Griceans like Atlas & Levinson (1981) and Horn (1984) seek to reduce those maxims to the so-called Q and I-principles. In this paper I want to argue that (i) there are major problems for reducing Gricean pragmatics to these two principles, and (ii) that, in ...

Relevance Implicatures

According to standard pragmatics, we should account for conversational implicatures in terms of Grice’s (1967) maxims of conversation. Neo-Griceans like Atlas & Levinson (1981) and Horn (1984) seek to reduce those maxims to the so-called Q and I-principles. In this paper I want to argue that (i) there are major problems for reducing Gricean pragmatics to these two principles, and (ii) in fact, ...