Paul Grice warned that 'the nature of conventional implicature needs to be examined before any free use of it, for explanatory purposes, can be indulged in' (1978/1989: 46). Christopher Potts heeds this warning, brilliantly and boldly. Starting with a definition drawn from Grice's few brief remarks on the subject, he distinguishes conventional implicature from other phenomena with which it migh...

There is much current debate about processing scalar implicature, but a considerable body of empirical evidence seems to support the idea that it requires additional time and effort on the part of the hearer (e.g. Breheny, Katsos and Williams 2005, Bott and Noveck 2004 and many others). The goal of this study was to contribute to our understanding of the cognitive processes that go on as compre...

In addition to introducing the very successful product line of conversational implicatures, Paul Grice and his successors have assembled an arguably inchoate class of phenomena under the trade name of CONVENTIONAL IMPLICATURE, whose reception in the scholarly marketplace has been somewhat bridled. A conventional implicature associated with expression E is a non-cancelable contribution to the co...

Most theories of implicature make reference to a notion of alternatives. Interlocutors reason about what the speaker could have said. In this paper, I investigate the structure of these alternatives. In particular, I ask how these alternative utterances are constrained by the interlocutors’ grammar. I argue that in order to derive certain implicatures, alternative utterances must be analyzed li...

Scalar implicature has served as a test case for exploring the relations between semantic and pragmatic processes during language comprehension. Most studies have used reaction time methods and the results have been variable. In these studies, we use the visual-world paradigm to investigate implicature. We recorded participants' eye movements during commands like "Point to the girl that has som...

The Gricean theory of conversational implicature has always been plagued by data suggesting that what would seem to be conversational inferences may occur within the scope of operators like believe, for example; which for bona fide implicatures should be an impossibility. Concentrating my attention on scalar implicatures, I argue that, for the most part, such observations can be accounted for w...

As Grice defined it, a speaker conversationally implicates that p only if the speaker expects the hearer to recognize that the speaker thinks that p. This paper argues that in the sorts of cases that Grice took as paradigmatic examples of conversational implicature there is in fact no need for the hearer to consider what the speaker might thus have in mind. Instead, the hearer might simply make...

Traditional question answering systems adopt the following framework: parsing questions, searching for relevant documents, and identifying/generating answers. However, this framework does not work well for questions with hidden assumptions and implicatures. In this paper, we describe a novel idea, a cascading guidance strategy, which can not only identify potential traps in questions but furthe...