In recent years, quantity implicatures - a type of pragmatic inference - have been widely debated in linguistics, philosophy, and psychology, and have been subject to an enormous variety of analyses, ranging from lexical, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic, to various hybrid accounts. In this first book-length discussion of the topic, Bart Geurts presents a theory of quantity implicatures that is resolutely pragmatic, arguing that the orthodox Gricean approach to conversational implicature is capable of accounting for all the standard cases of quantity implicature, and more. He shows how the theory deals with free-choice inferences as merely a garden variety of quantity implicatures, and gives an in-depth treatment of so-called 'embedded implicatures'. Moreover, as well as offering a comprehensive theory of quantity implicatures, he also takes into account experimental data and processing issues. Original and pioneering, and avoiding technical terminology, this insightful study will be invaluable to linguists, philosophers, and experimental psychologists alike.

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

"Implicatures in Discourse" examines Spanish conversations and oral narratives in order to seek support for a pragmatic theory of anaphora. Blackwell argues that the use of anaphoric expressions may be considered conversational implicatures that give rise to inferences of coreference and non-coreference. Her analysis shows how speakers abide by Levinson's 'neo-Gricean' principles of Quantity, Informativeness, and Manner, but that grammatical, semantic, cognitive, and pragmatic constraints interact with the neo-Gricean principles, influencing anaphora use and interpretation. The study also reveals how mutual knowledge, including familiarity with Spanish social and cultural norms, enables interlocutors to use and comprehend minimal referring expressions, which cultural outsiders may not be able to interpret. While drawing on earlier work on anaphora and reference, this book offers a fresh look at discourse anaphora, and sheds light on the ways in which speakers felicitously use and interpret anaphoric expressions in a variety of communicative contexts.

This book focuses on the semantic phenomenon of evaluativity and its consequences across constructions. Evaluativity has traditionally been associated exclusively with the positive construction, a term for sentences with a gradable adjective but with no overt degree morphology. John is tall is evaluative because it entails that John is tall relative to a contextually valued standard. John is taller than Sue and John is as tall as Sue are not evaluative because both could be used even if John and Sue were short. Previous accounts of evaluativity have assumed that it is not part of the inherent meaning of adjectives, but is contributed by a null morpheme. Jessica Rett argues against this analysis, proposing that no null morpheme is required. Instead, evaluativity is explained on the basis of assumptions that speakers and hearers make about the relationship between the simplicity of a situation and the simplicity of the language used to describe that situation; the analysis is couched in recent approaches to Gricean conversational implicature.

This book marks a new development in the field of grammaticalisation studies, in that it extends the field of grammaticalisation studies from relatively homogeneous languages to those possessing well-established and institutionalised second language varieties. In Hypothetical Modality, special reference is made to Singaporean English, a native-speaker L2 dialect of considerable importance in the South-East Asian region, and to the expression in the dialect of hypothetical modality, which appears to be indistinguishable from non-hypothetical modality in terms of the use of preterite or past forms of modal verbs. Within a grammaticalisation framework, a number of factors can be seen to be relevant to an explanation, including substratum and contact features such as tense/aspect marking, levels of lexical retention as an individual (psychological) phenomenon, and the fact that such dialects have a discontinuity in their development. In addition, the book defines pragmatic approaches to the understanding of hypothetical modality, in both diachronic and synchronic terms.

Scalar implicatures have enjoyed the status of one of the most researched topics in both theoretical and experimental pragmatics in recent years. This Research Topic presents new developments in studying the comprehension, as well as the production of scalar inferences, suggests new testing paradigms that trigger important discussions about the methodology of experimental investigation, explores the effect of prosody and context on inference rates. To a great extent the articles reflect the state of the art in the domain and outline promising paths for future research.

This handbook provides a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of a wide range of developmental and clinical issues in pragmatics. Principally, the contributions to this volume deal with pragmatic competence in a native language, in a second or foreign language, and in a selection of language disorders. The topics which are covered explore questions of production and comprehension on the utterance and discourse level. Topics addressed concern the acquisition and learning, teaching and testing, assessment and treatment of various aspects of pragmatic ability, knowledge and use. These include, for example, the acquisition and development of speech acts, implicatures, irony, story-telling and interactional competence. Phenomena such as pragmatic awareness and pragmatic transfer are also addressed. The disorders considered include clinical conditions pertaining to children and to adults. Specifically, these are, among others, autism spectrum disorders, Down syndrome, and Alzheimer's disease.

Open publication Opening the 9-volume-series Handbooks of Pragmatics, this handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the foundations of pragmatics. It covers the central theories and approaches as well as key concepts and topics characteristic of mainstream pragmatics, i.e. the traditional and most widespread approach to the ways and means of using language in authentic social contexts. The in-depth articles provide reliable orientational overviews useful to researchers, students, and teachers. They are both state of the art reviews of their topics and critical evaluations in the light of subsequent developments. Topics are thus considered within their scholarly context and also critically evaluated from current perspectives. The five major sections of the handbook are dedicated to the Conceptual and Theoretical Foundations (with a historiographic overview of the establishment and subsequent development of pragmatics), Key Topics (investigating indexicality, reference and other concepts that were the first to make their way from grammar into pragmatics and mainstream notions like speech acts, types of inference), the Place of Pragmatics in the Description of Discourse (delimiting pragmatics from grammar, semantics, prosody, literary criticism), and Methods and Tools.

Person and number are two basic grammatical categories. However, they have not yet been exhaustively documented in many sign languages. This volume presents a thorough description of the form and interpretation of person and number in Catalan Sign Language (LSC) personal pronouns. This is the first book exploring together the two categories (and their interaction) in a sign language. Building on a combination of elicitation methods and corpus data analysis, this book shows that person and number are encoded through a set of distinctive phonological features: person is formally marked through spatial features, and number by the path specifications of the sign. Additionally, this study provides evidence that the same number marker might have a different semantic import depending on the person features with which it is combined. Results of this investigation contribute fresh data to cross-linguistic studies on person and number, which are largely based on evidence from spoken language only. Furthermore, while this research identifies a number of significant differences with respect to prior descriptions of person and number in other sign languages, it also demonstrates that, from a typological standpoint, the array of distinctions that LSC draws within each category is not exceptional.

This book seeks to explain how discourse types influence the addressee's understanding of the communicator's intention. Examining global coherence-based accounts as well as proposals based on Gricean pragmatics, it argues that the key to a solution lies in the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance proposed by Sperber & Wilson.