Paul Grice warned that 'the nature of conventional implicature needs to be examined before any free use of it, for explanatory purposes, can be indulged in' (1978/1989: 46). Christopher Potts heeds this warning, brilliantly and boldly. Starting with a definition drawn from Grice's few brief remarks on the subject, he distinguishes conventional implicature from other phenomena with which it migh...

There is much current debate about processing scalar implicature, but a considerable body of empirical evidence seems to support the idea that it requires additional time and effort on the part of the hearer (e.g. Breheny, Katsos and Williams 2005, Bott and Noveck 2004 and many others). The goal of this study was to contribute to our understanding of the cognitive processes that go on as compre...

In addition to introducing the very successful product line of conversational implicatures, Paul Grice and his successors have assembled an arguably inchoate class of phenomena under the trade name of CONVENTIONAL IMPLICATURE, whose reception in the scholarly marketplace has been somewhat bridled. A conventional implicature associated with expression E is a non-cancelable contribution to the co...

Most theories of implicature make reference to a notion of alternatives. Interlocutors reason about what the speaker could have said. In this paper, I investigate the structure of these alternatives. In particular, I ask how these alternative utterances are constrained by the interlocutors’ grammar. I argue that in order to derive certain implicatures, alternative utterances must be analyzed li...

Scalar implicature has served as a test case for exploring the relations between semantic and pragmatic processes during language comprehension. Most studies have used reaction time methods and the results have been variable. In these studies, we use the visual-world paradigm to investigate implicature. We recorded participants' eye movements during commands like "Point to the girl that has som...

OBJECTIVE The images of smiling people are omnipresent in marketing. Frequency, smile characteristics, context of the smile and target audience in newspaper advertisements were points of interest of this study. MATERIAL AND METHODS Four examiners analyzed 600 advertisements from 46 European magazines and newspapers by using content and framing analysis. Twenty items of the analysis form the p...

The guideline group was selected to be representative of UKbased medical experts. The drafting group met and communicated by e-mail. Draft guidelines were revised by consensus. Since the initial guideline published by the British Committee for Standards in Haematology (BCSH; Colvin & Barrowcliffe, 1993) evidence-based guidelines on the use and monitoring of heparin have been included in the Ame...