To determine what the speaker in a cooperative dialog meant with his assertion, on top of what he explicitly said, it is crucial that we assume that the assertion he gave was optimal. In determining optimal assertions we assume that dialogues are embedded in decision problems (van Rooij, 2003) and use backwards induction for calculating them (Benz, 2006). In this paper we show that in terms of ...

If a speaker tells us that “some guests were late to the party,” we typically infer that not all were. Implicatures, in which an ambiguous statement (“some and possibly all”) is strengthened pragmatically (to “some and not all”), are a paradigm case of pragmatic reasoning. Inferences of this sort are difficult for young children, but recent work suggests that this mismatch may stem from issues ...

One of the tasks of language learning is the discovery of the intricate division of labour between the lexical-semantic content of an expression and the pragmatic inferences the expression can be used to convey. Here we investigate experimentally the development of the semantics-pragmatics interface, focusing on Greek-speaking five-year-olds' interpretation of aspectual expressions such as arxi...

We call approaches which use decision theoretic explications of Grice’ relevance maxim for selecting best answers and calculating implicatures relevance scale approaches. In this paper we discuss these approaches with respect to the questions: Are intuitively optimal assertions identical to assertions with maximal relevance? Can classical relevance implicatures be explained by the assumption th...

Three components of determiner meanings – truth conditions, implicatures, and presuppositions – have been identified. One of the major findings in acquisition, related to the truth conditions of the quantifiers, has been that children go through at least two stages of non-adult interpretation of the quantifier every (Philip, 1995). More recently, researchers (Noveck, 2001; Gualmini et al., 2001...

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...

This paper aims to show how general pragmatic pressures, interacting with the context of utterance, can produce specific conversational implicatures — as well as the lack thereof in nonsupporting environments. Inspired by the work of Merin (1997), Blutner (1998), van Rooy (2003a), Benz et al. (2005), and others, I use probabilities to represent speakers’ belief states and the content of their u...

Scalar implicatures—inferences from a weak description (“I ate some of the cookies”) that a stronger alternative is not true (“I didn’t eat all”)—are paradigm cases of pragmatic inference. Children’s trouble with scalar implicatures is thus an important puzzle for theories of pragmatic development, given their communicative competence in other domains. Previous research has suggested that acces...

Geurts & Pouscoulous (2009) present experimental evidence that embedded implicatures are not systematically available and conclude that localist theories of implicatures cannot be maintained. I argue that this conclusion can be strengthened by showing that their findings cannot be reconciled with a localist theory even when the latter is supplemented with a formal way to predict when an embedde...

This paper argues that local textual inferences come in three well-defined varieties (entailments, conventional implicatures/presuppositions, and conversational implicatures) and one less clearly defined one, generally available world knowledge. Based on this taxonomy, it discusses some of the examples in the PASCAL text suite and shows that these examples do not fall into any of them. It propo...