In this paper we address the common claim that perfective verbs presuppose the initial phase (or a process part) of events denoted by them, and assert their final phase (or a culmination part), while the meaning of imperfective verbs lacks both these components. Different formulations of this claim have been proposed by Padučeva (1996, 2011) and Romanova (2006) for Russian, and by Dočekal and K...

Implicatures are described as particular forms reasoning from best explanation, in which the paradigm of possible explanations consists of the possible semantic interpretations of a sentence or a word. The need for explanation will be shown to be triggered by conflicts between presumptions, namely hearer’s dialogical expectations and the presumptive sentence meaning. What counts as the best exp...

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 It involves a lexicon (Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs, PDEV), an existing data set (VPS-GradeUp), and an unpublished data set (RTE in PDEV Implicatures).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...

Scalar implicatures depend on alternatives in order to avoid the symmetry problem. I argue for a structure-sensitive characterization of these alternatives: the alternatives for a structure are all those structures that are at most as complex as the original one. There have been claims in the literature that complexity is irrelevant for implicatures and that the relevant condition is the semant...

Abstract According to Grice’s analysis, conversational implicatures are carried by the saying of what is said (Grice 1989: 39). In this paper, it argued that, whenever a speaker implicates content flouting one or several maxims, her implicature not only act and way it, but also non-saying should have been according would normal say in that particular context. Implicatures arise without maxim vi...

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...

Since Horn (1972) the notion of conversational implicature proposed by Grice has been put to use to explain certain interpretive differences between expressions in natural language and their counterparts in formal logic. For example, the sentences in (1) seem to convey more than they would be expected to if the natural language disjunction or had the same meaning as the logical disjunction∨, or...