In the current paper, we investigate existence of a shared derivation mechanism between manner and quantity implicature. As per Gricean-inspired perspective, both implicature are derived in substantially analogous fashion, relying on consideration alternative ways which speaker could have spoken, but didn’t. contrast, other accounts (e.g., grammatical accounts) consider to be distinct their der...

Grice’s notion of conversational implicature requires that speaker meaning be calculable on the basis of sentence meaning, and presumptions about the speaker’s adherence to cooperative principles of conversation and the ability of the hearer to work out the speaker’s meaning. However, the actual real-time consideration of cooperative principles by both the hearer and speaker runs up against sev...

Recent experimental evidence suggests that adults incorporate speaker knowledge into the derivation of pragmatic implicatures. Developmental studies report that 5-year-old children also succeed in taking speaker knowledge into account in implicature computation, but 4-year-olds fail. The present study investigated the pragmatic competence of 4year-olds, specifically the ability to incorporate s...

For the purposes of this note, I will assume that the Gricean account of scalar implicature is correct. I admit that I don’t have any qualms about making this assumption, since as far as I can tell, the Gricean account is the only game in town. But I thought I should mention it. With this preliminary out of the way, let us proceed to the problem area, and start by considering the following exam...

On one view of dialogue, the conversational record is part of the COMMON GROUND of the conversants. As conversants make assertions, the content of these assertions are added to the common ground, with the effect of limiting the context set (Stalnaker, 1978; Gazdar, 1979). According to Stalnaker, an assertion is assumed to be ACCEPTED, with a concomitant limitation of shared context, unless it i...

The explicature/implicature distinction is one manifestation of the distinction between the explicit content of an utterance and its implicit import. On certain ‘minimalist’ approaches, the explicit/implicit distinction is equated with the semantics/pragmatics distinction or with Paul Grice’s saying/implicating distinction. However, the concept of ‘explicature’, which belongs to the relevance-t...

The standard position in pragmatics to date has been that cancellability is useful way of differentiating implicatures from logical implications, semantic entailments and the like. In recent years, however, there has been considerable debate as to whether implicatures are in fact always cancellable, or indeed whether they are cancellable at all, amongst linguistic pragmaticians and language phi...