This book is an advanced debate on the nature of scalar implicatures, one of the most popular topics in philosophical linguistics in the last 20 years. Leading theorists in the field offer an up-to-date presentation of the subject in a way that will help readers to orient themselves in the vast literature on the topic.

This book is an advanced debate on the nature of scalar implicatures, one of the most popular topics in philosophical linguistics in the last 20 years. Leading theorists in the field offer an up-to-date presentation of the subject in a way that will help readers to orient themselves in the vast literature on the topic.

This volume comprises thirteen original research papers and three overview papers presenting new work using a number of experimental techniques from psycho- and neurolinguistics in the three key areas of current semantics and pragmatics: implicature, negation and presupposition.

Offers an accessible and thorough introduction to implicatures in pragmatics, and its interfaces with language and cognition.

This volume contains essays that explore explicit and implicit communication through linguistic research. Taking as a framework Paul Grice's theories on "what is said," the contributors explore a number of areas, including: the boundary between semantics and pragmatics; the concept of implicit communication; the idea of the logical form of our assertions; the notion of conventional meaning; the phenomenon of deixis, which refers to when an utterance require context in order to be understood fully; the treatment of definite descriptions; and the different kinds of pragmatic processes.

All humans can interpret sentences of their native language quickly and without effort. Working from the perspective of generative grammar, the contributors to this volume investigate three mental mechanisms, widely assumed to underlie this ability: compositional semantics, implicature computation and presupposition computation.

This handbook is the first to explore the growing field of experimental semantics and pragmatics. In the past 20 years, experimental data has become a major source of evidence for building theories of language meaning and use, encompassing a wide range of topics and methods. Following an introduction from the editors, the chapters in this volume offer an up-to-date account of research in the field spanning 31 different topics, including scalar implicatures, presuppositions, counterfactuals, quantification, metaphor, prosody, and politeness, as well as exploring how and why a particular experimental method is suitable for addressing a given theoretical debate. The volume's forward-looking approach also seeks to actively identify questions and methods that could be fruitfully combined in future experimental research. Written in a clear and accessible style, this handbook will appeal to students and scholars from advanced undergraduate level upwards in a range of fields, including semantics and pragmatics, philosophy of language, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, cognitive science, and neuroscience.