Recent research in semantics and pragmatics has revived the debate about whether there are two cognitively distinct categories of conversational implicatures: generalised and particularised. Generalised conversational implicatures are so-called because they seem to arise more or less independently of contextual support. Particularised implicatures are more context-bound. The Default view is tha...

This paper reports on an approach tomodel generalized implicatures using nonmonotonic logics. The approach, called compositional, is based on the idea of compositional semantics, where the implicatures carried by a sentence are constructed from the implicatures carried by its constituents, but it also includes some aspects nonmonotonic logics in order to model the defeasibility of generalized i...

Scalar implicatures are traditionally viewed as pragmatic inferences which result from a reasoning about speakers’ communicative intentions (Grice 1989). This view has been challenged in recent years by theories which propose that scalar implicatures are a grammatical phenomenon. Such theories claim that scalar implicatures can be computed in embedded positions and enter into the recursive comp...

Hearers get at the intended meaning of uncooperative utterances (i.e. utterances that conflict with the prescriptions laid down by the Gricean maxims) by pragmatically deriving sentences that reconcile these utterances with the maxims. Such pragmatic derivations are made according to pragmatic rules called implicatures. As they are pragmatic in nature, the conclusions drawn by applying implicat...

A number of recent proposals have used techniques from game theory and Bayesian cognitive science to formalize Gricean pragmatic reasoning (Frank & Goodman, 2012; Franke, 2009; Goodman & Stuhlmüller, 2013; Jäger, 2012). We discuss two phenomena which pose a challenge to these accounts of pragmatics: M-implicatures (Horn, 1984) and embedded implicatures which violate Hurford’s constraint (Chierc...

In this paper we discuss the interdependence of scalar implicatures and discourse structuring questions. We show that even prototypical cases of scalar implicatures can depend on an explicitly or implicitly given Question under Discussion. Particularly, we argue against the idea that scalar implicatures are automatically generated by the logical form of an utterance. We distinguish between thre...

Making inferences beyond the literal meaning of sentences occurs with certain scalar expressions via scalar implicatures. For example, adults usually interpret some as some but not all. On the basis of behavioral research, it has been suggested that processing implicatures is cognitively costly. However, many studies have used cases where sentences with some did not match the context in which 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...

This thesis is a both a descriptive and theoretical examination of implicatures, parts of the contextual meanings of utterances that are separate from their sense, their main point. The empirical taxonomy I describe draws on the work of Grice (1975), but fleshes out two important subcategories of implicature that he did not discuss in detail. One of these subcategories is the conventional impli...

The present study aimed to examine the translatorchr('39')s solutions to the translation of conversational implicatures from English into Persian. To do so, 120 conversational implicatures were extracted from the novel the Lord of the Rings (Tolkien, 1954) and classified based on Gricechr('39')s (1975) categorization of Maxims, including quality, quantity, relevance, and manner. Mur Duenaschr('...