Most studies of implicatures focused on conversational implicatures. This study, however, examined the conventional implicature induced by but. According to the literature, one can assume that the second argument in a ‘p but q’ construction is the argument with the most weight. This is, however, never experimentally tested with a direct distancingcontrastive but. We presented participants with ...

Building on Grice’s (1975) theory of “conversational implicature,” we propose that consumers react favorably to unusual color or flavor names (e.g., blue haze or Alpine snow) because they are essentially assuming that the marketing messages convey some useful information. Specifically, since consumers cannot interpret the literal meaning of the ambiguous label, they focus on what they assume is...

The article presents a formal analysis in the framework of bi-directional optimality theory of the free choice, ignorance and indifference implicatures conveyed by the use of indefinite expressions or disjunctions. Ignorance is expressed by standard means of epistemic logic. To express indifference we use Groenendijk and Stokhof’s question meanings. To derive implicature, Grice’s conversational...

In this paper I describe how miscommunication problems are dealt with in the spoken language system DIALOGOS. The dialogue module of the system exploits dialogic expectations in a twofold way: to model what future user utterance might be about (predictions), and to account how the user’s next utterance may be related to previous ones in the ongoing interaction (pragmaticbased expectations). The...

Paul Grice was concerned with the way logical terms such as some, or, and and take on extralogical meanings in conversational contexts. To take one example, Grice (1989) described or as having a weak word meaning identical to formal logic’s inclusive disjunction (which is false only in the case where both disjuncts are) but as conveying in conversation a stronger speaker’s meaning corresponding...

One of the standard principles of rationality guiding traditional accounts of belief change is the principle of minimal change: a reasoner’s belief corpus should be modified in a minimal fashion when assimilating new information. This rationality principle has stood belief change in good stead. However, it does not deal properly with all belief change scenarios. We introduce a novel account of ...

Cooperativity is usually seen as a central concept in the pragmatics of dialogue. There are a number of accounts of dialogue performance and interpretation that require some notion of cooperation or collaboration as part of the explanatory mechanism of communication. For instance, Grice’s cooperativity principle and associated maxims are used to explain conversational implicature (Grice, 1975)....

This paper studies learning inference by induction. We first consider the problem of learning logical inference rules. Given a set S of propositional formulas and their logical consequences T , the goal is to find deductive inference rules that produce T from S. We show that an induction algorithm LF1T, which learns logic programs from interpretation transitions, successfully produces deductive...