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...

This paper presents a new analysis of denn (because) in German. In addition to causal links between propositions, denn can express the causation of epistemically judged propositions or of speech acts. Denn’s behavior is explained by two properties: On the semantics side, I show that denn is a conventional implicature item. Syntactically, denn is a coordinating conjunction of CPs. These facts ex...

The purpose of this research is to find the functions conversational implicature in Doctor Strange Multiverse Madness movie based on Grice's theory by using Cooperative Principle as a guidance. Conversational how same sentence can be understood have two opposite meanings even though both are conveyed explicitly. Principles often interpreted general guidelines that cover interactions. This uses ...

To address complications involving ambiguity, presupposition and implicature, three processes underlying natural language interpretation are isolated: translation, entailment and attunement. A meta-language integrating these processes is outlined, elaborating on a proof-theoretic approach to presupposition. §

Pragmatic implicatures—inferences that weak statements imply that stronger ones could not be used—are a popular case study of children’s pragmatic development. A growing literature suggests that children make implicatures under certain conditions, but their performance varies widely across tasks, and few datasets allow direct comparisons between implicature types. We designed a simple paradigm ...

In this paper we motivate and describe a dialogue manager (called Frolog) which uses classical planning to infer causal implicatures. A causal implicature is a type of Gricean relation implicature, a highly context dependent form of inference. As we shall see, causal implicatures are important for understanding the structure of task-oriented dialogues. Such dialogues locate conversational acts ...

Plural nouns do not strictly refer to more than one object, which suggests that they are not semantically marked to mean “more than one” and that plurality inferences are made via a scalar implicature. Consistent with that hypothesis, recent evidence using a picture-matching paradigm supports founds that participants were equally fast to respond to a picture of a single object as a picture of m...

This paper offers a novel conversational implicature account of the pragmatic sensitivity of knowledge attributions. Developing an account I first suggested elsewhere (Locke, Inquiry 57:28–54, 2014b) and independently proposed by Lutz (in Synthese 191:1717–1740, 2014), this paper explores the idea that the relevant implicatures are generated by a constitutive relationship between believing a pr...