This paper contributes a pragmatic perspective to the complex question of how classify microaggressions that are committed via linguistic means. Given often communicated implicitly, two key questions arise: (i) on what grounds is recipient licensed infer microaggression has been committed, and (ii) extent can speaker claim they have misunderstood hence deny responsibility for having microaggres...

Bare numerals present an interesting challenge to formal semantics and pragmatics: they seem to be compatible between various readings (‘at least’, ‘exactly’, and ‘at most’ readings), and the choice of a particular reading seems to depend on complex interactions between contextual factors and linguistic structure. The goal of this article is to present and discuss some of the current approaches...

I present a system which reconciles free choice permission effect with other scalar implicatures. The core idea is to cluster together alternatives which are obtained by similar transformations of the original sentence (e.g., replacement of a given item with a stronger item). Interestingly, this system can be extended to account for presupposition projection.

Although people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often have severe problems with pragmatic aspects of language, little is known about their pragmatic reasoning. We carried out a behavioral study on high-functioning adults with autistic disorder (n = 11) and Asperger syndrome (n = 17) and matched controls (n = 28) to investigate whether they are capable of deriving scalar implicatures, which...

In Magri 2009a, I argue that a sentence such as #Some Italians come from a warm country sounds odd because it triggers the scalar implicature that not all Italians come from a warm country, which mismatches with the piece of common knowledge that all Italians come from the same country. If this proposal is on the right track, then oddness can be used as a diagnostic for scalar implicatures. In ...

Game theoretical analyses of communication (e.g. Lewis, Crawford & Sobel) demand cooperation between conversational partners for reliable information exchange to take place. Similarly, in pragmatics, the theory of language use, it is standard to assume that communication is a cooperative affair. Recently, this standard view has come under attack by Durcot and Merin, and it has been proposed tha...

We describe an annotation experiment combining topics from lexicography and Word Sense Disambiguation. It involves a lexicon (Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs, PDEV), an existing data set (VPS-GradeUp), and an unpublished data set (RTE in PDEV Implicatures). The aim of the experiment was twofold: a pilot annotation of Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) on PDEV implicatures (lexicon glosses...

In pragmatics, the theory of language use, it is standard to assume that communication is a cooperative affair. Recently, this standard view has come under attack by Ducrot and Merin, and it has been proposed that an argumentative view on natural language use is more appropriate. In this paper I discuss to what extent this attack is justified and whether the alternative view can provide a more ...