Abstract I argue against the view that metalinguistic usage is a form of conversational implicature. That view, suggested by Thomasson (Anal Philos 57(4):1-28, 2016) and Belleri (Philos Stud 174(9):2211–2226, 2017), has been most recently fleshed out Mankowitz (Synthese 199:5603–5622, 2021). provide two types criticism to implicature view. From an empirical point differs in key respects from st...

The present study aims at the analysis of conventional implicatures (Grice, 1991) actualized in Ukrainian dialogical discourse. distinction between and conversational is described. We argue that what commonly considered implicature fact only Implicatures are inherently because they intended by speaker derived addressee Therefore, it makes sense to regard as such not discursive context (such bei...

Horn scales are a popular vehicle in the investigation of implicatures. Yet even this most user-friendly of implicature research categories is plagued by methodological and extrapolating difficulties. One of these difficulties is the possible existence of pungent semantic discrepancies that get lost in translation. To form a basis for past and future Dutch scalar implicature research, we invest...

Can preschoolers make pragmatic inferences based on the intonation of an utterance? Previous work has found that young children appear to ignore intonational meanings and come to understand contrastive intonation contours only after age six. We show that four-year-olds succeed in interpreting an English utterance, such as "It LOOKS like a zebra", to derive a conversational implicature, namely [...

Scalar implicatures—inferences from a weak description (“I ate some of the cookies”) that a stronger alternative is not true (“I didn’t eat all”)—are paradigm cases of pragmatic inference. Children’s trouble with scalar implicatures is thus an important puzzle for theories of pragmatic development, given their communicative competence in other domains. Previous research has suggested that acces...