Pejoration is an under-researched topic in the Arabic language. This study intends to examine pejoration Egyptian Arabic, as well its domains and causes. The employs a socio-semantic approach for pursuing in-depth investigations of Arabic. was contextually traced with purpose revealing how contextual realities, including historical, social, cultural, even ethical norms, could contribute pejorat...

In his paper ‘Logic and conversation’ Grice (1989: 37) introduced a distinction between generalized and particularized conversational implicatures. His notion of a generalized conversational implicature (GCI) has been developed in two competing directions, by neo-Griceans such as Horn (1989) and Levinson (1983, 1987b, 1995, 2000) on the one hand, and relevance theorists such as Sperber & Wilson...

The notion of implicature was first introduced by Grice (1967, 1989), who defined it essentially as what is communicated less what is said. This definition contributed in part to the proliferation of a large number of different species of implicature by neo-Griceans. Relevance theorists have responded to this by proposing a shift back to the distinction between explicit and implicit meaning (co...

Linguistic communication relies on pragmatic implicatures such as the inference that if “some students passed the test,” not all did. Yet young children perform poorly on tests of implicature, especially scalar implicatures using “some” and “all,” until quite late in development. We investigate the origins of scalar implicature using tasks in which the scale arises from real-world context rathe...

According to the optimal assertions approach of Benz and van Rooij (2007), conversational implicatures can be calculated based on the assumption that a given signal was optimal, i.e. that it was the sender’s best choice if she assumes, purely hypothetically, a particular naive receiver interpretation behavior. This paper embeds the optimal assertions approach in a general signaling game setting...

In ordinary conversations, literal meanings of an utterance are often quite different from implicated meanings and the inference about implicated meanings is essentially required for successful comprehension of the speaker's utterances. Inference of finding implicated meanings is based on the listener's assumption that the conversational partner says only relevant matters according to the maxim...

Conventional implicature is conventional in the sense that it is a function of linguistic meaning and context in the way that truth-conditional content is. Nevertheless, although conventional in this sense it makes no contribution to truth-conditions. Rather it introduces a pragmatic presupposition. The delivery of content in implicature is in the mode of the unsaid. How exactly we should under...

15 INTRODUCTION 16 EXPERIMENT 1 18 METHOD 19 RESULTS 21 DISCUSSION 22 EXPERIMENT 2 23 METHOD 23 RESULTS 24 DISCUSSION 26 EXPERIMENT 3 27 METHOD 27 RESULTS 28 GENERAL DISCUSSION 29 REFERENCES 33 CHAPTER 3 ‘BUT’ HOW DO WE REASON WITH IT: AN EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF THE IMPLICATURE STEMMING FROM ‘BUT’ 35 ABSTRACT 35 INTRODUCTION 36 EXPERIMENT 1 44 METHOD 4435 INTRODUCTION 36 EXPERIMENT 1 44 M...