This book offers a comprehensive survey on the study of scalar implicatures, a central topic in modern pragmatics. This multidimensional and interdisciplinary topic is intensely studied in contemporary linguistics, psycholinguistics, and philosophy of language. Being one of the most prominent topics in pragmatics, they offer a window into the mind of communicative agents. On the one hand, scalar implicatures are closely related to the lexicon and grammar of natural languages. On the other hand, they shed light on how the linguistic meaning is enriched with context and speakers’ intentions and knowledge. Starting from an overview of the classic Gricean theory and the theoretical development introduced by post-Gricean scholars, the book illustrates the modern accounts of scalar implicatures across the domains of theoretical linguistics, such as semantics, pragmatics, and psycholinguistics. The central part of the book is devoted to the review of the most influential studies on the acquisition, comprehension, and processing of these pragmatic inferences. The last part of the volume focuses on open issues concerning scalar implicatures by illustrating recent experimental studies and theoretical accounts advanced by the authors in collaboration with several scholars.

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.

Pragmatics is the study of human communication: the choices speakers make to express their intended meaning and the kinds of inferences that hearers draw from an utterance in the context of its use. This Handbook surveys pragmatics from different perspectives, presenting the main theories in pragmatic research, incorporating seminal research as well as cutting-edge solutions. It addresses questions of rational and empirical research methods, what counts as an adequate and successful pragmatic theory, and how to go about answering problems raised in pragmatic theory. In the fast-developing field of pragmatics, this Handbook fills the gap in the market for a one-stop resource to the wide scope of today's research and the intricacy of the many theoretical debates. It is an authoritative guide for graduate students and researchers with its focus on the areas and theories that will mark progress in pragmatic research in the future.

A group of authors containing both leading authorities and young researchers addresses a number of issues of contrastiveness, polarity items and exhaustivity, quantificational expressions and the implicatures they generate, and the interaction between semantic operators and speech acts. The 19 contributions provide insights on the interplay between semantics and pragmatics. The volume’s reach is cross-linguistic and takes an unorthodox multi-paradigm approach. Languages studied range from European languages including Hungarian and Russian to East Asian languages such as Japanese and Korean, with rich data on focus and discourse particles. This volume contributes to a major area of research in linguistics of the last decade, and provides novel, state-of-the-art views on some of the central topics in linguistic research, and will appeal to an audience of graduate and advanced undergraduate researchers in linguistics, philosophy of language and computational linguistics.

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.

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