See

discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/295400963

Pragmatics: Theory and Experiment Growing

Together
Chapter February 2016

READS

82

2 authors:
Uli Sauerland

Petra B Schumacher

Centre for General Linguistics

University of Cologne

120 PUBLICATIONS 1,258 CITATIONS

54 PUBLICATIONS 454 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE

SEE PROFILE

Available from: Uli Sauerland

Retrieved on: 18 April 2016

Prepublication version. The final version appeared as: Sauerland, Uli &
Petra Schumacher. 2016. Pragmatics: Theory and experiment growing
together. Linguistische Berichte 245. pp. 3-24.

Pragmatics: Theory and Experiment Growing

Together
Uli Sauerland and Petra B. Schumacher
October 2015

Abstract
Pragmatics is already an established subfield of linguistics and the Gricean
distinction between literal and speakers meaning is one of the foundations
of modern linguistic theory.

But progress in pragmatics has been slow

compared to other subfields of linguistics over the last four decades. We

argue that one recent trend, namely Experimental Pragmatics, promises to
overcome the stagnant state of pragmatic theory. We present both the three
main developments that come together in Experimental Pragmatics (Gricean
pragmatics, precise models, and formal experiments). We then present recent
results that exemplify the promise of Experimental Pragmatics in two core
domains: scalar implicatures and metonymy.

Introduction

All linguistic theorizing assumes a distinction between the linguistic capability of

a speaker and how a speaker actually utilizes this capability in accord with his or
her general physical and cognitive abilities.1 Divergences between the linguistic
1

The distinction we have in mind is the one known as the competence-performance distinction
from the work of Chomsky (1965).

capability and its utilization are found in physically or cognitively handicapped and
non-handicapped individuals alike and across all linguistic capabilities (for example,
phonetic misperceptions, mispronunciations, morphosyntactic speech errors, lexical
retrieval problems, and syntactic parsing limitations). But the distinction between
linguistic capacity and its utilization is particularly pronounced when it comes to
conveying meaning. Speakers draw on much more than the linguistic capabilities
when they choose an utterance as they intend to convey a meaning. Listeners
are subtly attuned to the many factors speakers draw upon and therefore are
frequently successful at uncovering the meaning the speaker intended to convey. As a
consequence of this, the meaning of an utterance can be left unspecified by the lexical
content of it and its structure to a large degree, even without a specific prior discourse.
For instance, the sentence in (1) could be uttered out of the blue with many different
intentions: A parent hosting a party could utter the sentence to announce that it is
time to serve the cake. But a Mafia boss could utter the same words to issue a threat
to someone. Or a robber could use the sentence to warn an accomplice that the police
have gotten to the scene.
(1)

The boys have arrived.

We take the term Pragmatics as in Experimental Pragmatics to refer to the

discrepancy between the linguistic capabilities and their utilization in the domain of
meaning. The term Pragmatics is also sometimes used to generally refer to the theory
of language use following Peircian semiotics (Hardwick 1977), but in our opinion
the term Psycholinguistics also covers this general domain. We adopt the more
restricted use of the term Pragmatics that has been established by Grice (1957, 1989)
and his followers Cole (1978), Levinson (1983), Horn (1984). Gricean Pragmatics
assumes a distinction between literal and speakers meaning (Grice 1957). This

distinction corresponds to that between linguistic capability and its utilization: The
linguistic capability derives the literal meaning of an utterance, while the general
principles of utilization derive how speakers and listeners use the literal meaning for
communication.
Gricean pragmatics is one of the foundations of modern linguistic theory as some
version of it underpins all work on the semantics of language and work dependent
on semantic assumptions. Nevertheless, we claim that progress in pragmatics has
been slow compared to other subfields of linguistics over the last four decades. Over
many years, pragmatic theory hasnt substantially advanced beyond the promising
ideas and concepts of Grices work of the 1950s and 60s, while other subfields of
linguistics have advanced enormously at the same time. Problems that other subfields
of linguistics could not resolve have even been assigned to the pragmatic wastebasket. Two quantifiable pieces of evidence for the lack of progress are the following:
For one, many linguistics departments have opened new positions for semantics over
the last forty years, but positions for pragmatics are much rarer. Secondly, textbooks
from the 1980s such as Dowty et al. (1981), Lass (1984), Haegeman and Wekker
(1985), Radford (1986) are not in use anymore in other fields of linguistics. But
in pragmatics, Levinsons (1983) textbook has reached its 23rd printing in 2013. We
dont think this is because Gricean pragmatics represents a more advanced theory
than its theoretical contemporaries in syntax, phonology, and semantics. In fact,
there is evidence that Gricean pragmatics leaves much to be said: Many fundamental
theoretical problems in pragmatics have remained ill-understood. Consider only a
brief selection: the nature of pragmatic scales (Horn 1972, Matsumoto 1995, Fox
and Katzir 2011), the treatment of disjunction (Simons 1998, Sauerland 2004), the
factors trigging the presuppositional status of aspects of meaning (Gazdar 1979,
Heim 1983, Abrusn 2011, Romoli 2014), the status of numberals (Horn 1972, 1992,
Krifka 2000, Breheny 2008, Huang et al. 2013, Kennedy 2013, Spector 2013), and
3

the analysis of implicatures contributing to truth-conditional meaning (Cohen 1971,

Landman 1998, Levinson 2000, Chierchia 2013, Sauerland 2014).
We show in this paper that Experimental Pragmatics can and already has been
making much needed progress in core areas of pragmatic theorizing. Before we give
some concrete evidence of accomplishments of Experimental Pragmatics, we survey
the three core assumptions of Experimental Pragmatics that enabled the progress
already accomplished and that make much further progress feasible. We start with
a diagnosis of the problem faced by Gricean pragmatics: Why was so little progress
accomplished between 1967 (when significant parts of Grice 1989 first circulated)
and the present? We propose that pragmatics was held back simultaneously by
two obstacles: a lack of formally precise theories and a lack of suitable methods
to test the predictions of pragmatic theories two components of scientific progress
mutually dependent upon each other. Consider first the problem of informality: The
pragmatic theory of Grice as well as Neo- and Post-Gricean theories such as Sperber
and Wilson 1986 have rarely been fully formalized. Even at the time, critics pointed
out that pragmatic theories werent sufficiently precise as a theory to make testable
predictions (Sadock 1978, Levinson 1989). Nevertheless the problem persisted
because the attempts to provide more precise implementations of some of Grices
ideas such as those by Horn (1972) and Gazdar (1979) failed to gain substantial
influence, as compared to the more general, less precise work. We think the second
obstacle is related to this failure: the lack of suitable methods to address pragmatic
predictions. Gricean pragmatic theory is observation-based much like other early
scientific theories e.g. Darwins theory of evolution, as well as most other work in
theoretical lingustics. We mean to contrast the observational method (sometimes
called armchair method, but observation also includes work with consultants) here
with the use of formal experiments, though these of course also involve observations.
The observational method is appropriate for clearly discernable effects and enabled
4

Grice to formulate some widely accepted general pragmatic principles. But in many
cases in pragmatics, further progress requires experimental methods because they
are more sensitive than informal observations and can test hypotheses that are too
fine-grained for observation alone. Pragmatics differs in this respect from other
areas such as syntax and semantics, where observation based research has already
enabled researchers to formulate sophisticated, precise theories. These two obstacles
couldnt be overcome because they are interconnected without precise hypotheses,
sensitive verification methods alone do not help, and without sensitive verification
methods, precise hypotheses had no appeal. In our view, it has now become possible
to overcome the two obstacles that held back pragmatic theory and this direction is
represented by Experimental Pragmatics.

Experimental Pragmatics

The field of Experimental Pragmatics has emerged within the last decade.

It

combines research in Gricean pragmatics with the formal models of modern

grammar and the powerful experimental and statistical methods of psychology and
neuroscience. As a result, Experimental Pragmatics can theoretically state and
then empirically test much more precise hypotheses than research in pragmatics
previously could. Experimental Pragmatics is thereby expected to lead to a new
theory of mechanisms involved in language understanding. In this section, we
summarize the three underlying developments in pragmatics: the formal models
emerging from linguistics and cognitive science, and the methods that have led to
Experimental Pragmatics.

2.1

Pragmatic Theory

The first starting point of the project is Grices theory of meaning. What does a person
do when she ascribes meaning to a sentence as she hears or reads it? Most current
scientific work on this question assumes the notion of meaning that the philosopher
Grice proposed in an essay in 1957 and developed in a 1967 lecture series (published
as Grice 1989). Grice argues that two notions of meaning should be distinguished.
One is the Speakers Meaning a reconstruction of the intentions of the speaker when
making that utterance. The other is the Sentence Meaning a semantic representation
the grammar assigns to a sentence. For example, when a happy father utters to his
wife The boys have arrived (cf. (1) above) his intent may be to alert her to the
fact that their sons will soon arrive home. But a robber, a Mafiosi, or a policeman
uttering the same sentence can easily imagined to have a completely different intent.
The example shows that different utterances with the same sentence meaning can
carry different speaker-specific meanings.
In Grices model, a speaker with a certain intention selects a sentence on the basis
of its sentence meaning and the context. Based on their knowledge of the sentence
meaning and the context, the addressees then attempt to reconstruct the intention of
the speaker. Grices model obviously applies not just to language, but to all forms
of communication. The case of language, however, is the most interesting case
because the grammar of sentence meanings offers an infinite array of possibilities
to the speaker. Research in pragmatics since Grice has focused on the problem
of meaning the connection of speakers intention and sentence meaning to yield
the speakers meaning. This was a natural step: Though pragmatics was originally
conceived of as the study of all language use, virtually any aspect of language
use involves a voluntary, intentional choice by the speaker, and thereby carries a
speakers meaning with it. Most research in Experimental Pragmatics adopts the
6

focus of Grices philosophy on speakers meaning at least as a starting point. Gricean

pragmatics, however, has not progressed substantially in the last three decades, at
least compared to other subfields of linguistics as we discussed above. Importantly,
it has now become possible to overcome both obstacles that held back pragmatic
theory.

2.2

Precise Grammatical Models

The second starting point of the experimental pragmatic endeavor is the modern
theory of grammar. For the assignment of sentence meaning, research in pragmatics
relies on other subfields of linguistics. Especially research in semantics has yielded
a number of suitable, interesting models for sentence meaning that connect up to
research in pragmatics. Other subfields of linguistics, such as syntax and phonology
concern the structure and pronunciation of sentences but their effect on interpretation
is often also captured via the semantic representation. The most widely accepted
research program in semantics is truth-conditional semantics, which builds on
mathematical model theory and originates from work of Montague (1974[1970]).
This line of work assumes that truth conditions are a core aspect of sentence meaning.
The approach is suited in particular for declarative sentences (like You left.), though
perhaps less so for questions (Who left?), imperatives (Leave!) and other sentence
types where truth isnt directly at issue. But for declarative sentences, the truth
conditions of a sentence indeed play an important role for pragmatics specifically,
part of the speakers intentions is in many cases to notify or convince another person
of the truth of their statement. Research in semantics has been very successful over
the last twenty years.
While semantics and pragmatics have initially developed separately, this has
changed in recent years. This change has led to journals such as Semantics and
7

Pragmatics and the same researchers being active in both areas. In Germany in
particular the Semantiknetzwerk grant (DFG SA 925/2) led by Sauerland from 2004
to 2008 has supported this development. Also, formal notions in use in semantics
have been adopted in pragmatics to make more precise the important intuitions of
Grice and other pragmaticists. Finally and perhaps most importantly, the semanticspragmatics borderline has itself become the target of debate in several domains like
implicatures and speech-acts. These debates have been initiated by semanticists in
part to apply semantic models to pragmatic data. Overall the influence of semantics
on pragmatics has led to more complete and more precise models of meaning
that make it easier to derive testable predictions. Nevertheless progress has been
difficult since pragmatics addresses a much broader domain than semantics. This
broader scope of pragmatics has two consequences: 1) Semantic models must be
extended to capture pragmatic phenomena, and 2) verifying the new more finegrained predictions requires a new methodological basis.

2.3

Experimental Methods

The third and final starting point for Experimental Pragmatics is the application of
experimental methods to investigate sentence use. Research in pragmatics has to
date relied primarily on the observation of native speaker intuitions. But while many
questions can be decided using observation alone, many current questions require
more sensitive methods. Two reasons explain that experimental research hasnt
been influential in pragmatics in the past: 1) Only few researchers could access
certain experimental methods because of lack of interdisciplinary collaboration or
training. 2) The developments in both experimental paradigms and pragmatic theory,
especially as mathematical models from semantics gained influence, made it difficult
for researchers engaged in the experimental approach to follow both developments
8

simultaneously. However, both reasons dont apply anymore because of recent

advances in the accessibility of experimental methods.
Recent developments in software technology now make it much easier for
researchers to contribute to linguistic theory while at the same time conducting
experiments. For example, use of the Mechanical Turk internet platform and similar
software tools make it possible to conduct several types of experiments such as
questionnaire surveys, reaction time studies and mouse tracking even for researchers
without access to a laboratory. In many other domains, such as eye tracking, software
has become more user-friendly, lowering the barrier to start experimental research.
The methodological advances in cognitive neuroscience have further offered new
avenues to the language-brain connection, which traditionally has been investigated
through the study of lesion patients who show impaired language performance. With
the rise of neuroimaging methods in particular functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) cognitive neuroscience has gained a non-invasive approach to
identify brain regions involved in language processing in unimpaired language
users. The spatial advances have been complemented by time-course data form
electrophysiology, which has been of prime importance to disentangle the fast and
multifaceted processes that contribute to language processing.
For pragmatics, the growing accessibility and use of sophisticated experimental
methods is particularly important: Speaker intuitions underlying research in other
subfields such as syntax and semantics are comparatively easy to access. Pragmatics,
however, concerns the felicity of sentences in context and the data are therefore
often more difficult to pin down and test empirically. While the mathematical
models of semantics allow pragmaticists to make precise predictions, often only
experimental methods are sensitive enough to test these predictions. Easy access
to experimental methods combined with precise models has thereby brought about
a fundamental change in pragmatic research: The emergence of the field of
9

Experimental Pragmatics.

Exemplary Results

Experimental Pragmatics by now extends across all domains of traditional pragmatics

(see also Noveck and Reboul 2008). The most substantial progress to date has been
on implicatures, presuppositions, non-literal interpretation, and pragmatic models.
We report on two areas specifically in detail: scalar implicatures and metonymy.

3.1

Scalar Implicatures

Grices concept of implicature has been highly influential. The technical term
Implicature that Grice introduced is now even found in some mainstream dictionaries
such as the Oxford English dictionary.2 But even though the concept has been
proposed in the 1967 (Grice 1967), probably the most significant progress in
understanding the concept has been made only with the advent of Experimental
Pragmatics in the last 15 years. The most active line of research has concerned scalar
implicatures. In fact, research on scalar implicatures has in a sense driven the rise of
Experimental Pragmatics.
Consider the two most frequently studied triggers of a scalar implicature, the
words or and some. Grices concept of implicature rests on the assumption that
cooperative speakers want to be truthful and informative. Both or and some arent
fully informative though as the two examples in (1) from (Sauerland 2004, 367)
show: (1-a) leaves it open which of the two options Kai actually had, and (1-b)
leaves it open what happened with the other peas.
(1)

a.
2

Kai had peas or broccoli last night.

Verified on February 25, 2015 at www.oxforddictionaries.com.

10

b.

Kai had some of the peas last night.

Grice observes that seemingly underinformative utterances generally give rise to

implicatures. In the cases in (1), some notable implicatures are that Kai didnt have
both the peas and the broccoli last night for (1-a), and that Kai didnt have all of the
peas last night for (1-b). The pragmatic analysis of scalar implicatures as developed
by Grice (1975, 1989), Horn (1972), and Gazdar (1979) assumes three components:
1) Specific alternative words or phrases are lexically related to others such as or
to and and also some to all. 2) A version of alternative semantics as introduced
by Hamblin (1973) projects sentence alternatives from the lexical alternatives. And
3) a pragmatic comparison of sentences based on logical entailment predicting for
sentence P that it implicates that any alternative Q that entails P must be false
when P is uttered. The implicatures noted for (1) are predicted from this analysis
as follows: The alternative sentences Kai had peas and broccoli last night and Kai
had all of the peas last night are projected from the lexical alternatives. Because
these alternatives entail (1-a) and (1-b) respectively, the alternatives must be false
when (1-a) and (1-b) are uttered. This derives the implicatures we noted for (1).
Work in Experimental Pragmatics has turned up surprising support for Grices
general model, but also helped to narrow down the theoretical model of implicatures.
Consider first the asymmetry between speakers meaning and implicatures Grice
assumed. Grices analysis predicts that adult speakers meanings should often be
richer and more restrictive than the literal meanings, that are more bare. Grices
account therefore predicts that the literal meaning is more accessible than the
strengthened speakers meaning. This prediction has indeed been confirmed by
experimental research on a number of populations that seem to access only speakers
meaning. Noveck 2001 presented the first, important finding supporting this claim.
Specifically, Noveck (2001) reports that seven year old children overwhelmingly
11

accept sentences such as Some elephants have trunks and Some giraffes have long
necks as valid. But as Noveck also reports, adults only allow the more informative
sentences with all instead of some, and mostly reject the underinformative sentences
with some. Based on this experiment and a second one on the modal might, Noveck
(2001) claims that children generally lack scalar implicatures, while they understand
the basic literal meaning. This strongly supports the division of meaning into these
two components that goes back to Grice.
Novecks results have been replicated successfully in a large number of
experiments using different methodologies, with a variety of different test
populations, and also a number of different scalar items. Importantly, any effort to
reduce the difficulty of the task for the children has still reliably replicated Novecks
effect, though often in a younger age group. For instance, Chierchia et al. (2001)
report that 5 year olds lack a scalar implicature of disjunction or using a truth value
judgment task. Papafragou and Musolino (2003) report data from 5 year old Greek
speaking children also using a truth value judgment task and report that children lack
scalar implicatures with some and also with the verb start. Other works since then
confirm that some implicatures are absent with children are by Guasti et al. (2005),
Bagassi et al. (2009), Foppolo et al. (2012), Huang and Snedeker (2009), Katsos
and Bishop (2011), Barner et al. (2011), Ozturk and Papafragou (2014), Yatsushiro
(2008), Stiller et al. (2015), Tieu et al. (2014, 2015), Hochstein et al. (2014), Singh
et al. (2015) and others. Moreover, work on other subject populations has shown
that they too seem to find some scalar implicatures more difficult than the logical
meaning. Specifically, this has been found for language impaired children (Katsos
et al. 2011), adults under time-pressure (Bott and Noveck 2004, Chevallier et al.
2008) or subject to an additional cognitive demand (De Neys and Schaeken 2007,
Dieussaert et al. 2011), and second language learners (Slabakova 2010, Davidson
and Mayberry 2014). Still more evidence in favor of division of meaning into
12

semantic and pragmatic components has come from online measures such as eventrelated brain potential data (Noveck and Posada 2003, Politzer-Ahles et al. 2013,
Politzer-Ahles and Gwilliams 2015) and eye-tracking measures (Breheny et al. 2006,
Huang and Snedeker 2011) (though Grodner et al. 2010). Overall, the experimental
literature has confirmed pragmatic theory in this domain. Substantial advances have
also been made in terms of methodology, for instance with Katsos and Bishop (2011)
identifying shortcomings of binary choice tasks.
One of the most interesting findings emerging now though, goes beyond mere
confirmation of existing theory by experiments, but instead leads to back-and-forth
between theory and experiment. In this regard, at least two types of implicatures
pattern with the semantic meaning in some psycholinguistic tests. These two cases
are numerals and free-choice implicatures. Numerals such as two are generally
interpreted as exactly two, although an at least two interpretation is also available
in some cases (Spector 2013, Breheny 2008, Kennedy 2013, and others). One
theoretical account of these data is the following (Horn 1972, Spector 2013),
where two is an example of a numeral: In the semantics, two has an at least two
interpretation, but because the more informative alternative (at least) three exists too,
two also has an implicature of not more than two. But the not more than n implicature
of the numeral n behaves differently from other implicatures: In language acquisition,
Papafragou and Musolino (2003), Hurewitz et al. (2006), Huang et al. (2013) and
others found that children as young as two interpret two as exactly two. The other type
of implicature that children seem to routinely draw are free choice inferences (Tieu
et al. 2015). Free choice inferences arise, for example, with disjunction embedded
under an existential modal (Kamp 1973, Fox 2007, Kratzer and Shimoyama 2014,
and others). Logically, (2) is compatible with a situation where Jack is only allowed
to have either sushi or pasta this is shown by the fact that (2) is compatible with the

13

continuation but I dont know which of the two. But pragmatically (2) is enriched to
the interpretation that Jack is allowed to have sushi and also allowed to have pasta.
(2)

Jack may have sushi or pasta.

The free-choice inference is derived as a scalar implicature if the two sentences

Jack only may have sushi and Jack only may have pasta are considered, i.e. a
scenario where both of these alternatives are false, the only way (2) can be true is
if Jack can freely choose between sushi and pasta. Tieu et al. (2015) show that
4 to 5 year old children speaking either Chinese or English can draw free-choice
inferences in examples like (2), while at the same they lack other scalar implicatures.
Chemla and Bott (2014) report a similar finding from adult processing. These
experimental findings have interesting consequences for pragmatic theory: Why
dont all implicatures behave alike? At present, at least two hypotheses are under
investigation. On the one hand, the exact interpretation of numerals and/or free
choice inferences could be not an implicature, but actually be part of the logical
meaning of the relevant sentences; an analysis that has been debated in both cases
even before the advent of Experimental Pragmatics (e.g. (Horn 1992, Zimmermann
2000). On the other hand, the cases may indicate which particular aspects of drawing
scalar implicatures cause difficulty for children and other groups. Specifically,
Gualmini et al. (2001), Barner et al. (2011) and others suggest that accessing some
lexical alternative relations is psycholinguistically difficult. This would explain the
difference between the standard scalar implicatures and the exactness of numerals
and free choice inference as follows: The standard implicatures are based on the
lexical relation of some to all and or to and, which is difficult to learn and access. But
the free choice inference doesnt involve any lexical relation, only the knowledge that
for a disjunction a or b individual disjuncts are considered as alternatives (Sauerland

14

2004). And the lexical relation of two to three must be easy to learn and access since
numerals are usually learned as sequences. Additional support for the second type
of explanation may come from at least five further observations: 1) If children are
aware of the lexical alternative, their performance with scalar implicatures improves
(Gualmini et al. 2001). 2) Children differ from adults in interpreting only some where
the not all inference isnt an implicature, but draws on the same lexical alternative
relation (Barner et al. 2011). 3) Children seem to draw exhaustive inferences (or ad
hoc implicatures) correctly (Stiller et al. 2015), and 4) the prediction that children
should interpret disjunction conjunctively seems to be borne out (Singh et al. 2015).
5) Disjunction morphemes with a conjunctive implicatures seem to exist at least in
Warlpiri (Bowler 2015) and Sauerland et al. (2015), Sudo (2014).
A second prediction of Grices account is that only full utterances should have
implicatures: Are there embedded implicatures? This prediction has been debated in
the theoretical literature pretty much since Grices work (Cohen 1971, Horn 1985,
Levinson 2000, and others). Initially, Grices prediction here is called into question
by examples like (3) where negation applies to the implicature of like.
(3)

Around here we dont like coffee we love it. (Horn 1985, p. 139)

However, examples like (3) also have a peculiar intonation and have been taken by
Horn and others to rely on special properties of negation. At the same time, always
adding implicatures to the semantic meaning in the scope of other operators would
make the wrong predictions for examples like (4) as Sauerland (2004) discusses. If
here some of the peas is interpreted as some but not all of the peas and furthermore
or as exclusive disjunction, (4) would be predicted to be acceptable in case Kai had
both the broccoli and all of the peas.
(4)

Kai had the broccoli or some of the peas last night.

15

So, the issue of how to account for seemingly embedded implicatures as in (3)
has remained unresolved for many decades. Once experimental methods and also
more sophisticated accounts of how and when to integrate implicatures with the
semantic meaning below the utterance level became available (Chierchia 2004,
2006), this raised the expectation that soon decisive data on the phenomenon
would become available. Experimental work has indeed made some contributions
(Geurts and Pouscoulous 2009, Clifton and Dube 2010, Chemla and Spector 2011,
2014, Cummins et al. 2012), but the most significant progress in this area so
far relied on data that can be ascertained without the use of formal experiments.
Specifically, Chierchia et al. (2009) show that data like (5) that Gazdar (1979)
regarded as exceptions to Hurfords constraint on disjunction receive a natural
account if embedded implicatures are possible.
(5)

Mary read some or all of the books.

Sauerland (2012, 2014) discusses the question whether embedded implicatures

can occur also in intermediate positions as sketched in (6), where exh marks the
constituent at which implicatures are determined and Q1 and Q2 mark semantic
operators that have scope relative to the implicature. Grices original account predicts
only global implicatures that are determined at the sentence level as indicated in (6-a).
Grices account can be easily amended by lexical mechanism (e.g. Levinson (2000))
to also allow local implicatures as in (6-c). But, intermediate implicatures computed
above one operator, but below another, represent a more serious challenge to Grices
account.
(6)

a.

[exh . . . [Q1 . . . [Q2 . . . scalar item . . . ]]]

(global)

b.

[Q1 . . . [exh . . . [Q2 . . . scalar item . . . ]]]

(intermediate)

16

c.

[Q1 . . . [Q2 . . . [exh . . . scalar item . . . ]]]

(local)

The evidence Sauerland (2014) presents in favor of the existence of intermediate

implicatures is again mostly verifiable without the use of formal experiments like
example (7), which ought to be unacceptable unless embedded implicatures exist.
(7)

Either she must read at least three of the books or she must read at least four
of them.

In sum, the evidence at present supports the view that implicatures can be computed
at local and intermediate points of the semantic composition, not only at the
utterance level as Grices pragmatic theory predicts. Experimental pragmatics played
only a supporting role in the research on this question so far, but in the process
several methodological issues have been better understood, specifically relating to
ambiguity detection and typicality. Ambiguity detection is needed, for example,
to distinguish the global and local implicature interpretations of (8). Geurts and
Pouscoulous (2009) assumed that evidence for the ambiguity would need to come for
subjects judging (8) false in situation where (8-a) is true and (8-b) false. However,
independently Gualmini et al. (2008) and Meyer and Sauerland (2009) argued for
a preference to judge ambiguous sentences true when any of their readings is true.
For this and other reasons, the experimental data of Geurts and Pouscoulous (2009)
fails to resolve the debate concerning local implicatures (Sauerland 2010, Chemla
and Spector 2011, Gotzner and Benz 2014) (pace Geurts and van Tiel 2013), but
advanced the field methodologically.
(8)

Every boy liked some of the books.

global: Every boy likes at least some of the books, and at least one boy didnt
like all.
17

local: Every boy likes some and not all of the books.
Typicality also plays a role in judgments of felicity (Sassoon 2013). van Tiel (2013),
Geurts and van Tiel (2013), van Tiel (2014) point out that typicality is relevant
to experimental work concerning embedded implicatures, especially for studies
that rely on graded judgments such as the work of Chemla and Spector (2011).
Specifically, van Tiel (2013) proposes that quantified noun phrases generally are
related to a typicality profile. For example (9), a situation where John read 5 out
of 10 books is more typical than one where he read 3 out of 10 or 9 out of 10.
(9)

John liked some of the books.

Van Tiels work raises several interesting questions as Cummins (2014) and Chemla
and Spector (2014) discuss. At this point, it is clear that typicality is an important
additional factor to consider in pragmatic models for experimental tests.
In sum, this section showed how Experimental Pragmatics has helped to
confirm and disconfirm respectively two central predictions of pragmatic theory.
Experimental work mostly confirmed the prediction that implicatures are a separate
component of meaning from the literal meaning, and this work has let to fruitful
back-and-forth between theory and experiment concerning the internal mechanisms
of implicature generation, specifically the hypothesis that access to lexical scales is
effortful component that must be learned. The prediction that implicatures are only
generated globally at the full sentence level, however, has been mostly disconfirmed.
The discussion of this prediction is instructive in that early experimental work
has primarily shown that additional factors concerning ambiguity resolution and
typicality had to be taken into consideration, and at this point the stronger evidence
doesnt come from formal experiments, but data that can be judged reliably by adult
speakers. In the next section, we present a second case study of Experimental
18

Pragmatics.

3.2

Metonymy

Differences in speaker meaning are also described for lexical pragmatics, a branch
of pragmatics that is concerned with context-dependent uses of lexical expressions.
The expression Dickens may for instance be used for the person as in Dickens visited
the United States in 1842 or for his work in Tim wants to read Dickens. The meaning
of university ranges from a place of education, a period of education, a building to
an institution or a person working there (The university called), etc. These discrete
interpretations have been discussed in the context of polysemy (semantically related
meanings) or metonymy (derived meanings) and have been distinguished from socalled homonymy (semantically unrelated meanings, such as (bat denoting an animal
or a club). Crucially, while a speaker could utter something more explicit like
(10-a), she may opt for the short version (10-b) in an attempt to satisfy the pragmatic
principle of brevity (Grice 1989).
(10)

a.

A person who works at the university called.

b.

The university called.

Theoretical approaches have been interested in formalizing lexical representations

and pragmatic operations (Sperber and Wilson 1986, Copestake and Briscoe 1995,
Carston 2002). Experimental research has targeted the mechanisms underlying
lexico-pragmatic processing (see e.g. Frisson (2009) for an overview). The questions
addressed in the processing research include for instance i) are there different
processing costs for underived and derived meanings?, ii) are there processing
differences among types of context-dependent expressions?

19

Early research revealed that comprehenders do not show a processing

disadvantage for different meanings of semantically related, polysemous expressions.
Frazier and Rayner (1990) found for instance that while unrelated homonymous
words (e.g., bat) evoked effects of frequency of occurrence (with longer reading
times for the contextually required less frequent meaning) or number of meanings
(with longer reading times for words with more meanings), polysemous words were
not affected by these features. This gave rise to the view that polysemous expressions
are semantically underspecified and speakers meaning is inferred from the sentential
context.
The availability of eye tracking methods has greatly impacted this line of
investigation. With this methodology, eye movements and eye gaze during reading
are measured, and the sequence of fixations and rapid movements (saccades) that
are observable as a sentence unfolds offer valuable insights into real-time processing
costs. Following up on Frazier and Rayners (1990) findings for polysemy, Frisson
and Pickering carried out a series of studies on metonymy, where a meaning is
derived via a conventional relation. Different kinds of meaning relations producerfor-product (meeting Dickens vs. reading Dickens) (Frisson and Pickering 2007),
place-for-institution (stopping at the university vs. consulting with the university and
place-for-event (hitchhiking around Vietnam vs. protesting during Vietnam) (Frisson
and Pickering 1999) show rather robust processing profiles with no increases on
early or late eye movement measures between derived and underived meanings.
This indicates that the respective interpretations are available at no further expense
and that the comprehension of a derived, metonymic meaning can be as easy as
its underived counterpart. Further support for this comes from a study in which
an unknown name was introduced and associated with a particular profession (e.g.,
Needham as an author) (Frisson and Pickering 2007). This contextual association
sufficed to facilitate the comprehension of reading Needham, suggesting that the
20

derivational rule can be inferred in a straightforward manner when enough contextual

cues are available.

Without adequate contextual grounding, reading Needham

showed increased rereading times (i.e.

second pass times) relative to meeting

Needham.
Other derivations evoked processing demands. Differences were e.g. reported for
mass-count alternations (Frisson and Frazier 2005). So-called portioning (turning
a mass noun into a count noun) revealed processing costs (longer fixations) for the
derived meaning; grinding (turning a count noun into a mass) also engendered a
processing burden for the derived forms reflected in even later enhanced eye tracking
measures, which may suggest that the grinding operation exerts additional conceptual
effort, while portioning is readily available for the cognitive system. Overall, these
eye tracking data point towards an intricate cognitive architecture and indicate that
meaning alternations and metonymic operations are not uniform. Experimental
findings like this call for an amelioration of linguistic theory. The relation between
the different meaning extensions seems to differ along a continuum, with some
derived meanings being available as straightforwardly as the underived meanings
and others requiring additional processing effort. We return to possible explanations
of these differences further below.
This view of subtle distinctions between meaning alternations can be further
refined when we turn to another time-sensitive method, the recording of eventrelated brain potentials (ERPs). Electrophysiological measures capture the electrical
activity of neurons related to cognitive, sensory or motor processes. In language
research, they are time-locked to a cognitive event (e.g., the onset of a critical
word). ERP profiles can be described with respect to the magnitude and polarity
of their amplitudes, their time-course and topographical distribution. This allows
us to tease apart discrete processes triggered by a critical word. Experiments on
metonymy identified two distinct profiles: one group of expressions that did not
21

show a processing difference between derived and underived meanings, and another
group that registered processing costs for the derived meaning. The former included
content-for-container alternation (putting down the beer meaning the beer bottle
or beer glass vs. drinking the beer, (Schumacher 2013)) as well as producer-forproduct metonymy (Schumacher and Weiland-Breckle 2015). In turn, processing
demands were observed for container-for-content metonymy (drinking the goblet
referring to the content of the goblet, Schumacher (2013)) or property-for-person
(ham sandwich in (11) referring to the ham sandwich eater, Schumacher (2014)).
These processing costs were reflected by a positive-going ERP amplitude peaking
around 600 ms after the onset of the critical expression. In light of other findings
from ERP research, this Late Positivity has been associated with the shift to the
intended meaning, which brings about a reconceptualization and results in updating
of the underlying representation (see Schumacher (2013) for further information on
reconceptualization and updating). In the cases where the processing of derived
and underived meanings did not differ, it is claimed that the lexical representation
made available the two extensions. Note that ERP investigations of homonyms relative to unambiguous words (Hagoort and Brown 1994) or polysemous words
(Klepousniotou et al. 2012) registered a different ERP effect, a negative deflection
peaking around 400 ms after homonym-onset (N400), indicating that the underlying
mechanisms in homonymy and metonymy differ from each other.
(11)

The ham sandwich wants to pay.

The experimental approach has thus provided important insights for a formal
characterization of meaning alternations. It revealed that words and their usages
split in different classes, with some intended meanings being as easily understood
as their core meaning, and others evoking processing costs relative to the underived

22

meaning. These differences may be due to the conventionality or typicality of the

relationship between the denotations. More typical relations, such as producer-forproduct or content-for container, are known to the entire speech community and may
hence be an integral part of the lexical repertoire. Less conventional alternations,
such as property-for-person, are created on the spot by the speaker, have a certain
innovative potential and are constraint by a particular situation (e.g., the restaurant
setting for (11)).
By using a mix of methodologies, further aspects of language processing can be
highlighted that go beyond the questions addressed above. The eye tracking and ERP
data converge on the typology of meaning alternation outlined above. An issue that
has occupied the theoretical debate for a long time has been the role of the underived
(supposedly more basic) meaning during comprehension: does the human parser
derive the intended meaning after processing the underived meaning (Searle 1979),
does the underived meaning dwell in the background (Giora 2008, Carston 2010) or is
the contextually relevant meaning processed immediately (Sperber and Wilson 1986,
Gibbs 1994)? Cross-modal priming tasks (Rubio Fernndez 2007) and combining
ERPs and masked priming (Weiland 2014) has revealed that presenting properties of
the underived meaning in a sentence using a derived meaning induced a priming
effect, indicating that the underived meaning lingers on and does not encumber
the comprehension of metonymy.

Another question is whether the processes

underlying metonymy understanding are generalizable to other cognitive domains.

Neuroimaging research has started to address this issue (Bohrn 2013, Rapp et al.
2011). In the long run, this line of research should be systematically extended to other
phenomena of lexical pragmatics, such as approximation, metaphor, hyperbole, and
so on with the aim of formulating a more fully fledged model of speakers meaning
via cross-comparison (cf. e.g. initial comparison of metaphor and metonymy in
Gibbs (1990), Rundblad and Annaz (2010), Bambini et al. (2013), Weiland (2014).
23

Conclusion

Pragmatics until recently has been an area of linguistic theory where progress
has lagged behind other subfields.

We argued that Experimental Pragmatics

has the potential to change this situation.

Experimental Pragmatics combines

neuro-cognitive experimental methods with precise semantic-pragmatic models of

language processing. The combination of these two advances allows Experimental
Pragmatics to formulate and assess finely nuanced research hypotheses and reliably
test the empirical predictions of competing models. Experimental Pragmatics has
incorporated the intuitions of Grices ground-breaking work from the 1960s, but also
made progress on central questions raised by Gricean pragmatics. We have outlined
recent progress in two areas scalar implicatures and metonymy that we consider
highly impressive. By going hand in hand, theory and experiment cross-fertilize each
other and finally make possible substantial progress in pragmatics.
Experimental Pragmatics also shows how experimental and theoretical research
can interact which is perhaps instructive for other subfields of linguistics.
Traditionally experimental research on language often took place far removed from
theoretical research because experimental methods required a full-time commitment
and made it for all but a few exceptional researchers impossible to combine
experimental and theoretical approaches. Technical advances especially in software
technology have dissolved this barrier: Currently a researcher can simultaneously
carry out at least some types of experiments and keep up-to-date on theoretical
developments. The field has already benefitted enormously from the interchange of
ideas between experiment and theory, and we think much further progress is possible.

24

Bibliography
Abrusn, Mrta. 2011. Predicting the presuppositions of soft triggers. Linguistics
and Philosophy 34:491535.
Bagassi, Maria, Marco DAddario, Laura Macchi, and Valentina Sala. 2009.
Childrens acceptance of underinformative sentences: The case of some as a
determiner. Thinking & Reasoning 15:211235.
Bambini, Valentina, Marta Ghio, Andrea Moro, and Petra B. Schumacher.
2013. Differentiating among pragmatic uses of words through timed sensicality
judgments. Frontiers in Psychology 4.
Barner, David, Neon Brooks, and Alan Bale. 2011. Accessing the unsaid: The role
of scalar alternatives in childrens pragmatic inference. Cognition 118:8796.
Bohrn, Isabel Christine. 2013. Affective and esthetic processes in reading. Doctoral
Dissertation, Freie Universitt Berlin, Germany.
Bott, Lewis, and Ira A. Noveck. 2004. Some utterances are underinformative: The
onset and time course of scalar inferences. Journal of Memory and Language
51:437457.
Bowler, Margit. 2015. Conjunction and disjunction in a language without and. In
Semantics and Linguistic Theory, volume 24, 137155.
Breheny, Richard. 2008. A new look at the semantics and pragmatics of numerically
quantified noun phrases. Journal of Semantics 25:93139.
Breheny, Richard, Napoleon Katsos, and John Williams. 2006. Are generalised scalar
implicatures generated by default? an on-line investigation into the role of context
in generating pragmatic inferences. Cognition 100:434463.
25

Carston, Robyn. 2002.

Thoughts and utterances: The pragmatics of explicit

communication. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons.

Carston, Robyn. 2010. Xiiimetaphor: Ad hoc concepts, literal meaning and mental
images. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 110:295321.
Chemla, Emmanuel, and Lewis Bott. 2014.

Processing inferences at the

semantics/pragmatics frontier: disjunctions and free choice. Cognition 130:380

396.
Chemla, Emmanuel, and Benjamin Spector. 2011.

Experimental evidence for

embedded scalar implicatures. Journal of Semantics 28:359400.

Chemla, Emmanuel, and Benjamin Spector. 2014. Distinguishing typicality and
ambiguities, the case of local scalar implicatures. Ms. LSCP & IJN.
Chevallier, Coralie, Ira A Noveck, Tatjana Nazir, Lewis Bott, Valentina Lanzetti,
and Dan Sperber. 2008. Making disjunctions exclusive. The Quarterly Journal of
Experimental Psychology 61:17411760.
Chierchia, Gennaro. 2004.

Scalar implicatures, polarity phenomena, and the

syntax/pragmatics interface. In Structures and beyond, ed. Adriana Belletti, 39

103. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Chierchia, Gennaro. 2006. Broaden your views: Implicatures of domain widening
and the logicality of language. Linguistic Inquiry 37:535590.
Chierchia, Gennaro. 2013. Logic in grammar: Polarity, free choice, and intervention.
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Chierchia, Gennaro, Stephen Crain, Maria Teresa Guasti, Andrea Gualmini, and
Luisa Meroni. 2001. The acquisition of disjunction: Evidence for a grammatical
26

view of scalar implicatures. In BUCLD 25 Proceedings, ed. A.H.-J. Do et al.,

157168.
Chierchia, Gennaro, Danny Fox, and Benjamin Spector. 2009.
constraint and the theory of scalar implicatures:

Hurfords

Evidence for embedded

implicatures. In Presuppositions and implicatures. proceedings of the mit-paris

work- shop, ed. Paul Egr and Giorgio Magri. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics.
Semanticsarchive.
Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press.
Clifton, Charles Jr., and Chad Dube. 2010. Embedded implicatures observed: A
comment on Geurts and Pouscoulous (2009). Semantics and Pragmatics 3:113.
Cohen, Jonathan. 1971. Some remarks on Grices views about the logical particles
of natural language. In Pragmatics of natural languages, ed. Y. Bar-Hillel, 5068.
Dordrecht: Reidel.
Cole, Peter, ed. 1978. Further notes on logic and conversation. New York: Academic
Press.
Copestake, Ann, and Ted Briscoe. 1995.

Semi-productive polysemy and sense

extension. Journal of Semantics 12:1567.

Cummins, Chris. 2014. Typicality made familiar: A commentary on Geurts and van
Tiel (2013). Semantics and Pragmatics 7:115.
Cummins, Chris, Uli Sauerland, and Stephanie Solt. 2012. Granularity and scalar
implicature in numerical expressions. Linguistics and Philosophy 35:135169.

27

Davidson, Kathryn, and Rachel I. Mayberry. 2014. Do adults show an effect of

delayed first language acquisition when calculating scalar implicatures? Language
Acquisition .
De Neys, Wim, and Walter Schaeken. 2007. When people are more logical under
cognitive load. Experimental Psychology (formerly Zeitschrift fr Experimentelle
Psychologie) 54:128133.
Dieussaert, Kristien, Suzanne Verkerk, Ellen Gillard, and Walter Schaeken. 2011.
Some effort for some: further evidence that scalar implicatures are effortful. The
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 64:23522367.
Dowty, David R., Robert E. Wall, and Stanley Peters. 1981. Introduction to Montague
semantics. Number 11 in Synthese Language Library. Dordrecht, Netherlands:
Reidel.
Foppolo, Francesca, Maria Teresa Guasti, and Gennaro Chierchia. 2012. Scalar
implicatures in child language: Give children a chance. Language learning and
development 8:365394.
Fox, Danny. 2007.

Free choice and the theory of scalar implicatures.

In

Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics, ed. Uli Sauerland and

Penka Stateva, 71120. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fox, Danny, and Roni Katzir. 2011. On the characterization of alternatives. Natural
Language Semantics 19:87107.
Frazier, Lyn, and Keith Rayner. 1990. Taking on semantic commitments: Processing
multiple meanings vs. multiple senses. Journal of Memory and Language 29:181
200.

28

Frisson, Steven. 2009.

Semantic underspecification in language processing.

Language and Linguistics Compass.

Frisson, Steven, and Lyn Frazier. 2005. Carving up word meaning: Portioning and
grinding. Journal of Memory and Language 53:277291.
Frisson, Steven, and Martin J. Pickering. 1999.

The processing of metonymy:

evidence from eye movements. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,

Memory, and Cognition 25:1366.
Frisson, Steven, and Martin J. Pickering. 2007. The processing of familiar and novel
senses of a word: Why reading Dickens is easy but reading Needham can be hard.
Language and Cognitive Processes 22:595613.
Gazdar, Gerald. 1979. Pragmatics: Implicature, presupposition, and logical form.
New York, N.Y.: Academic Press.
Geurts, Bart, and Nausicaa Pouscoulous. 2009.

Embedded implicatures?!?

Semantics and Pragmatics 2:134.

Geurts, Bart, and Bob van Tiel. 2013. Embedded scalars. Semantics and Pragmatics
6:137.
Gibbs, R. W. Jr. 1990. Comprehending figurative referential descriptions. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 16:5666.
Gibbs, Raymond W. 1994. The poetics of mind: Figurative thought, language, and
understanding. Cambridge University Press.
Giora, Rachel. 2008. Is metaphor unique. The Cambridge handbook of metaphor
and thought 143160.

29

Gotzner, Nicole, and Anton Benz. 2014. Embedded implicatures revisited: Issues
with the truth-value judgment paradigm.

In Proceedings of the Formal

and Experimental Pragmatics, ed. Judith Degen, Michael Franke, and Noah
Goodman, 16. Tbingen, Germany: ESSLLI.
Grice, H. Paul. 1957. Meaning. Philosophical Review 66:377388.
Grice, H. Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Speech acts, ed. Peter Cole
and Jennifer L. Morgan, number 3 in Syntax and Semantics, 4158. New York:
Academic Press.
Grice, Paul. 1967. Logic and conversation. Unpublished lecture notes from William
James Lectures at Harvard, 1967.
Grice, Paul. 1989.

Studies in the way of words.

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press.
Grodner, D.J., N.M. Klein, K.M. Carbary, and M.K. Tanenhaus. 2010. Some, and
possibly all, scalar inferences are not delayed: Evidence for immediate pragmatic
enrichment. Cognition 116:4255.
Gualmini, Andrea, Stephen Crain, Luisa Meroni, Gennaro Chierchia, and
Maria Teresa Guasti. 2001.

At the semantics/pragmatics interface in child

language. In Proceedings of SALT 11, 231247. Ithaca, N.Y.: CLC-Publications,

Cornell University.
Gualmini, Andrea, Sarah Hulsey, Valentine Hacquard, and Danny Fox. 2008. The
question-answer requirement for scope assignment. Natural Language Semantics
.

30

Guasti, Maria Teresa, Gennaro Chierchia, Stephen Crain, Francesca Foppolo, Andrea
Gualmini, and Luisa Meroni. 2005. Why children and adults sometimes (but not
always) compute implicatures. Language and Cognitive Processes 20:667696.
Haegeman, Liliane, and Herman Wekker. 1985. A modern course in English syntax.
Routledge.
Hagoort, Peter, and Colin Brown. 1994.

Brain responses to lexical ambiguity

resolution and parsing. In Perspectives on sentence processing, 4581. Lawrence

Erlbaum Associates.
Hamblin, C.L. 1973. Questions in Montague English. Foundations of Language
10:4153.
Hardwick, Charles S., ed. 1977.

Semiotic and significs: The correspondence

between Charles S. Peirce and Lady Victoria Welby. Bloomington, USA: Indiana
University Press.
Heim, Irene. 1983. On the projection problem for presuppositions. In Proceedings
of WCCFL 2, ed. D. Flickinger, 114125. Stanford, Calif.: CSLI.
Hochstein, Lara, Alan Bale, Danny Fox, and David Barner. 2014.

Ignorance

and inference: Do problems with gricean epistemic reasoning explain childrens

difficulty with scalar implicature? Journal of Semantics ffu015.
Horn, Laurence R. 1972. On the semantic properties of logical operators in English.
Doctoral Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.
Horn, Laurence R. 1984. Toward a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Qbased and R-based implicature. In Meaning, form, and use in context: Linguistic
applications, ed. Deborah Schiffrin, 1142. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown
University Press.
31

Horn, Laurence R. 1985.

Metalinguistic negation and pragmatic ambiguity.

Language 121174.
Horn, Laurence R. 1992. The said and the unsaid. In Proceedings of SALT 2, ed.
C. Barker and D. Dowty, 163192. Ohio: Ohio State University.
Huang, Yi Ting, and Jesse Snedeker. 2009.
interpretation in 5-year-olds:

Semantic meaning and pragmatic

Evidence from real-time spoken language

comprehension. Developmental Psychology 45:17231739.

Huang, Yi Ting, and Jesse Snedeker. 2011.

Logic and conversation revisited:

Evidence for a division between semantic and pragmatic content in real-time

language comprehension. Language and Cognitive Processes 26:11611172.
Huang, Yi Ting, Elizabeth Spelke, and Jesse Snedeker. 2013. What exactly do
numbers mean? Language Learning and Development 9:105129.
Hurewitz, Felicia, Anna Papafragou, Lila Gleitman, and Rochel Gelman. 2006.
Asymmetries in the acquisition of numbers and quantifiers. Language Learning
and Development 2:7796.
Kamp, Hans. 1973. Free choice permission. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
New Series 74:5774.
Katsos, Napoleon, Clara Andres Roqueta, Rosa Ana Clemente Estevan, and Chris
Cummins. 2011. Are children with specific language impairment competent with
the pragmatics and logic of quantification? Cognition 119:4357.
Katsos, Napoleon, and Dorothy V. M. Bishop. 2011.

Pragmatic tolerance:

Implications for the acquisition of informativeness and implicature. Cognition

120:6781.
32

Kennedy, Christopher. 2013. A scalar semantics for scalar readings of number words.
In From grammar to meaning: The spontaneous logicality of language, ed. Ivano
Caponigro and Carlo Cecchetto, 172200. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press.
Klepousniotou, Ekaterini, G Bruce Pike, Karsten Steinhauer, and Vincent Gracco.
2012.

Not all ambiguous words are created equal: An eeg investigation of

homonymy and polysemy. Brain and Language 123:1121.

Kratzer, Angelika, and Junko Shimoyama. 2014. Indeterminate pronouns: The
view from Japanese. In Contrastiveness in information structure, alternatives,
and scalar implicatures, ed. Chungmin Lee, Ference Kiefer, and Manfred Krifka.
Heidelberg, Germany: Springer.
Krifka, Manfred. 2000. At least some determiners arent determiners. Unpublished
ms., University of Texas, Austin.
Landman, Fred. 1998. Plurals and maximalization. In Events and grammar, ed.
Susan Rothstein, 237271. Kluwer.
Lass, Roger. 1984. Phonology. Cambridge University Press.
Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press.
Levinson, Stephen C. 1989. A review of Relevance. Journal of Linguistics 25:455
472.
Levinson, Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive meanings. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Matsumoto, Yo. 1995. The conversational condition on Horn scales. Linguistics and
Philosophy 18:2160.
33

Meyer, Marie-Christine, and Uli Sauerland. 2009.

A pragmatic constraint on

ambiguity detection: A rejoinder to Bring and Hartmann and to Reis. Natural

Language & Linguistic Theory 27:139150.
Montague, Richard. 1974[1970]. The proper treatment of quantification in ordinary
English. In Richard Montague: Selected papers, ed. R. Thomason, 247270. New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
Noveck, Ira. 2001. When children are more logical than adults: Experimental
investigations of scalar implicature. Cognition 78:165188.
Noveck, Ira, and Andres Posada. 2003.

Characterizing the time course of an

implicature: An evoked potentials study. Brain and Language 85:203210.

Noveck, Ira A., and Anne Reboul. 2008. Experimental pragmatics: a Gricean turn in
the study of language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12.
Ozturk, Ozge, and Anna Papafragou. 2014. The acquisition of epistemic modality:
From semantic meaning to pragmatic interpretation. Language Learning and
Development 124.
Papafragou, Anna, and Julien Musolino. 2003. Scalar implicatures: Experiments at
the semantics-pragmatics interface. Cognition 86:253282.
Politzer-Ahles, Stephen, Robert Fiorentino, Xiaoming Jiang, and Xiaolin Zhou.
2013. Distinct neural correlates for pragmatic and semantic meaning processing:
An event-related potential investigation of scalar implicature processing using
picture-sentence verification. Brain research 1490:134152.
Politzer-Ahles, Stephen, and Laura Gwilliams. 2015. Involvement of prefrontal
cortex in scalar implicatures: evidence from magnetoencephalography. Language,
Cognition and Neuroscience .
34

Radford, Andrew. 1986. Transformational syntax. Cambridge University Press.

Rapp, A., M. Erb, W. Grodd, M. Bartels, and K. Markert. 2011. Neural correlates of
metonymy resolution. Brain and Language 119:196205.
Romoli, Jacopo. 2014. The presuppositions of soft triggers are obligatory scalar
implicatures. Journal of Semantics fft017.
Rubio Fernndez, Paula. 2007. Suppression in metaphor interpretation: differences
between meaning selection and meaning construction.

Journal of Semantics

24:345371.
Rundblad, G., and D. Annaz. 2010. The atypical development of metaphor and
metonymy comprehension in children with autism. Autism 14:2946.
Sadock, Jerrold M. 1978. On testing for conversational implicature. In Pragmatics,
number 9 in Syntax and Semantics. New York, N.Y.: Academic Press.
Sassoon, Galit Weidmann. 2013. Vagueness, gradability and typicality. Brill.
Sauerland, Uli. 2004. Scalar implicatures in complex sentences. Linguistics and
Philosophy 27:367391.
Sauerland, Uli. 2010. Embedded implicatures and experimental constraints: A reply
to Geurts & Pouscoulous and Chemla. Semantics & Pragmatics 3:2:113.
Sauerland, Uli. 2012. The computation of scalar implicatures: Pragmatic, lexical, or
grammatical? Language and Linguistics Compass 6:3649.
Sauerland, Uli. 2014. Intermediate scalar implicatures. In Pragmatics, semantics and
the case of scalar implicatures, ed. Salvatore Pistoia-Reda, 7298. Basingstoke,
UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

35

Sauerland, Uli, Ayaka Tamura, Masatoshi Koizumi, Ryo Tachibana, and John M.
Tomlinson Jr. 2015. Tracking down disjunction. Preproceedigs of LENLS 12.
Schumacher, Petra B. 2013.

When combinatorial processing results in

reconceptualization: Towards a new approach of compositionality. Frontiers in

Psychology 4.
Schumacher, Petra B. 2014. Content and context in incremental processing:the ham
sandwich revisited. Philosophical Studies 168:151165.
Schumacher, Petra B., and Hanna Weiland-Breckle. 2015. Whom did you read? on type clashes and word senses. 28th CUNY Conference on Human Sentence
Processing, USC Los Angeles.
Searle, John R. 1979.

Expression and meaning.

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge

University Press.
Simons, Mandy. 1998. OR: Issues in the semantics and pragmatics of disjunction.
Doctoral Dissertation, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.
Singh, Raj, Ken Wexler, Andrea Astle, Deepthi Kamawar, and Danny Fox. 2015.
Children interpret disjunction as conjunction: Consequences for theories of
implicature and child development. Carleton University, ms.
Slabakova, Roumyana. 2010. Scalar implicatures in second language acquisition.
Lingua 120:24442462.
Spector, Benjamin. 2013. Bare numerals and scalar implicatures. Language and
Linguistics Compass 7:273294.
Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. 1986. Relevance: Communication and cognition.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
36

Stiller, Alex J, Noah D Goodman, and Michael C Frank. 2015. Ad-hoc implicature
in preschool children. Language Learning and Development 11:115.
Sudo, Yasutada. 2014. Higher-order scalar implicatures of ya in Japanese. Handout,
TEAL 9, University of Nantes.
van Tiel, Bob. 2013. Embedded scalars and typicality. Journal of Semantics .
van Tiel, Bob. 2014.

Quantity matters.

Doctoral Dissertation, University of

Nijmegen.
Tieu, Lyn, Cory Bill, Jacopo Romoli, and Stephen Crain. 2014. Plurality inferences
are scalar implicatures: Evidence from acquisition. In Semantics and Linguistic
Theory, volume 24, 122136.
Tieu, Lyn, Jacopo Romoli, Peng Zhou, and Stephen Crain. 2015.

Childrens

knowledge of free choice inferences and scalar implicatures. Journal of Semantics

ffv001.
Weiland, Hanna Christina. 2014. Experimental research into non-literal language:
ERP studies on metaphors and metonymies. Doctoral Dissertation, Universitt
Mainz.
Yatsushiro, Kazuko. 2008. Quantifier acquisition: Presuppositions of every. In
Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 12, ed. Atle Grnn, 663677. Oslo, Norway:
ILOS.
Zimmermann, Thomas Ede. 2000. Free choice disjunction and epistemic possibility.
Natural Language Semantics 8:255290.

37