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Description:
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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.
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