Grice’s distinction between what is said and what is implicated has greatly clarified our understanding of the boundary between semantics and pragmatics. Although border disputes still arise and there are certain difficulties with the distinction itself (see the end of §1), it is generally understood that what is said falls on the semantic side and what is implicated on the pragmatic side. But ...

study into the mauve stinger. “The trouble is that we know so little about jellyfish,” says Haughton. Most people think of them as having little impact on ecosystems. “Now we need to learn, very quickly, about their behaviour and about their breeding patterns in our waters.” The team is getting its first basic data by monitoring the number of jellyfish spotted from the decks of ferries crossing...

Knott's empirical study of cue phrases has resulted in a taxonomic classiication of some 150 cue phrases. The taxonomy can be viewed as a partial ordering on the set of phrases, and hence we can view cue phrase selection in terms of scalar implicature, following Hirschberg. We draw out some of the immediate consequences of this view, including the problematic status of the conventional/conversa...

Opinions may be expressed implicitly via inference over explicit sentiments and events that positively/negatively affect entities (goodFor/badFor events). We investigate how such inferences may be exploited to improve sentiment analysis, given goodFor/badFor event information. We apply Loopy Belief Propagation to propagate sentiments among entities. The graph-based model improves over explicit ...

I seek to mediate this debate. I describe a general framework for interactional models of implicature and then assess the major arguments for grammar-driven approaches. My central findings are that many of these arguments are conceptually or theoretically problematic, and that the valid ones do not compromise the Gricean picture. Stepping back, I find that the two sides in this debate are not r...