In this article we present two sets of experiments designed to investigate the acquisition of scalar implicatures. Scalar implicatures arise in examples like Some professors are famous where the speaker's use of some typically indicates that s/he had reasons not to use a more informative term, e.g. all. Some professors are famous therefore gives rise to the implicature that not all professors a...

In this paper we are going to show that error coping strategies play an essential role in linguistic pragmatics. We study the effect of noisy speaker strategies within a framework of signalling games with feedback loop. We distinguish between cases in which errors occur in message selection and cases in which they occur in signal selection. The first type of errors affects the content of an utt...

While previous sentiment analysis research has concentrated on the interpretation of explicitly stated opinions and attitudes, this work initiates the computational study of a type of opinion implicature (i.e., opinion-oriented inference) in text. This paper described a rule-based framework for representing and analyzing opinion implicatures which we hope will contribute to deeper automatic int...

According to standard pragmatics, we should account for conversational implicatures in terms of Grice’s (1975) maxims of conversation. NeoGriceans like Atlas & Levinson (1981) and Horn (1984) seek to reduce those maxims to the so-called Q and I-principles. In this paper I want to argue that (i) there are major problems for reducing Gricean pragmatics to these two principles, and (ii) that, in f...

Abstract Modified numerals, such as at least three and more than five , are known to sometimes give rise ignorance inferences. However, there is disagreement in the literature regarding nature of these inferences, their context dependence, differences between . We present a series experiments which sheds new light on issues. Our results show that (a) inferences robust those (b) presence strengt...