Review of Experimental Pragmatics |
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EDITORS: Noveck, Ira A; Sperber, Dan TITLE: Experimental Pragmatics SERIES: Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition PUBLISHER: Palgrave Macmillan YEAR: 2006
Napoleon Katsos, Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge
INTRODUCTION This book is a collection of papers in the area of experimental pragmatics, the discipline which employs experimental methodologies developed in psycholinguistics and the study of reasoning to investigate issues raised in the linguistic-pragmatics literature. The aim of the book is threefold: to show that such investigations have been taking place for at least 30 years now with substantial achievements, to identify new areas for interdisciplinary research, and overall to give a 'brand name' to the area and underscore the mutual benefits for experimental and theoretical disciplines.
The book begins with a detailed introduction by the editors which delineates the scope of the discipline, the range of topics and the methodologies used in the chapters. Noveck & Sperber argue that experimental pragmatics (henceforth ExPrag) does not devalue the traditional methods of pragmatic inquiry, or the range of psycholinguistic interests. They argue for the complementariness of ExPrag with its parent-disciplines, and underscore the mutual benefits for both pragmaticians and psychologists. For the former, given years of conceptual argumentation and judgments based on intuitions, ''it is hard to find...crucial evidence that would clearly confirm one theory and disconfirm another'' (p. 7). Moreover, since ''armchair theories owe much of their appeal to their vagueness'' (p. 9) the experimental approach forces theoreticians to make clear, precise and falsifiable hypotheses. On the other hand, psycholinguistic theories can benefit from the comprehensive and evenly detailed view of the phenomena discussed in the pragmatic literature. For example, there is 'a wealth of psychological research on metaphors, but implicatures remain largely untouched, when from a pragmatic point of view, the two phenomena are of comparable importance' (p. 9). The benefit for psychologists would be to make use of pragmatic concepts and theories 'in order to better describe and explain a range of phenomena that are clearly of a psycholinguistic nature, and to develop new experimental paradigms' (p. 9).
The contributed chapters are organised in three parts. The first part, chapters 2-6, presents 'Pioneering Approaches', which involve researchers that have made significant contributions in the area and are considered an ideal example of the experimental pragmatic approach. The second and third parts deal with current issues and identify new areas of research. The second part, chapters 7-11, is devoted on a wide range of topics whereas the third, chapters 12-15, involves studies focussing on scalar implicatures.
A short summary of the chapters can be found in the introduction of the book (chapter 1) as well as in a very informative LINGUIST List review of the 2004 hardbound edition of the book by Rick Nouwen (available online at http://cf.linguistlist.org/cfdocs/new-website/LL-WorkingDirs/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?SubID=54034).
SUMMARY
PART 1: Pioneering approaches.
In the first chapter of Part 1, Herbert Clark and Adrian Bangerter discuss how the study of reference has benefited from the interaction between theoretical linguists, philosophers of language and experimentalists. The authors discuss how reference was initially considered an autonomous addressee-blind activity, with emphasis on the speaker (whose task is to select a referent out of a set of alternatives). Clark and Bangerter argue that the coordination condition, proposed by philosophers Grice (1975) and Lewis (1979), is a significant step forward but still falls short of describing the full richness of the phenomenon. Clark and Bangerter review a number of studies that indicate that reference actually requires joint speaker/hearer participation which is different than mere coordination. They emphasize how three types of evidence (a) conceptual argumentation and intuitive judgments, (b) observations from natural conversational interactions and (c) experimental evidence, have been instrumental in highlighting different aspects of reference, and argue for the overall significance of being able to account for observations from natural conversations.
In the second chapter, Ray Gibbs demonstrates how experimental investigations have had a major contribution to pragmatics. He addresses core issues in the semantics/pragmatics interface, including making and understanding direct and indirect speech acts, understanding definite descriptions and the distinction between what is said and speaker meaning. The experimental findings from Gibbs' lab are directly informative for hotly debated issues in pragmatics, for example arguing for the short-circuited nature of indirect requests. Throughout the paper, Gibbs emphasizes the contribution of experimental methodologies in the development of testable, that is, falsifiable, pragmatic theories. Similarly, he highlights the benefits for psychologists, since the use of accurate psycholinguistic methods such as reading time paradigms and priming have helped dispel concerns on whether it is possible to do good psychology working in the area of pragmatics (as opposed to areas of core grammar such as syntax, etc).
In the third chapter, Sam Glucksberg investigates the processing of metaphors and argues against a pervasive conception in the field of psycholinguistics (which ultimately derives from theoretical linguistics) that pragmatics is in some sense secondary to syntax and semantics. Processing models that are inspired by Grice's and Searle's analysis of metaphor as an implicature arising from a violation of the cooperative principle, predict that the literal meaning of an expression is accessed first (and effortlessly), while non-literal meaning emerges at a second stage, as a result of the fact that the literal interpretation does not satisfy the Cooperative Principle and maxims. Glucksberg presents several experiments from his lab on metaphor comprehension and concept combination that argue for the opposite, namely that pragmatic processes are not in any psychologically meaningful sense secondary: they are not costly, nor effortful, but rather exhibit the automaticity one would expect from modular processes.
In the fourth chapter, Guy Politzer proposes a macro- and micro-pragmatic analysis of reasoning tasks. He indicates that pragmatics is informative both for understanding the interaction of experimenters and participants (which is a special case of conversation), as well as for analysing the interpretation of the specific utterances of the experiment itself, the premises, consequences, conclusions etc. By analysing some of the most widely used tasks, Politzer pinpoints cases where pragmatic analysis shows that what was apparently an erroneous response, was in fact a correct response of participants that were behaving 'pragmatically' rather than strictly logically. Politzer illustrates that the experimenter can make the participants sensitive to either pragmatic / logical interpretations of the task with the correct questions and probes, and illustrates that a thorough understanding of pragmatics is necessary for interpreting reasoning tasks.
The final chapter of Part 1 is contributed by Tony Sanford and Linda Moxey. The aim of their work is to investigate how far linguistic theories of quantifiers can take us towards a psychologically plausible model of quantifier comprehension. They argue that an approach that is based on communicative functions is better poised to account for the processing of quantifiers than analytical theories. They draw on two properties of quantifiers: (a) their ability to focus on a set of entities, either the reference or complement set, and (b) their ability to deny certain suppositions of an utterance. In a series of studies Sanford and Moxey argue that it is these properties that can account for the processing of quantifiers rather than analytical notions such as monotonicity.
Parts 2 and 3 investigate current issues in Experimental Pragmatics. Part 2 presents a wide range of topics, whereas Part 3 is focussed on scalar implicatures.
PART 2: Current Issues in Experimental Pragmatics
In chapter 7 of the book, Jean-Baptiste Van der Henst and Dan Sperber present several studies that aim to provide strong experimental confirmation for Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson 1995). They produce falsifiable predictions based on the two principles of Relevance Theory, the cognitive principle that human cognition is geared towards the maximisation of relevance, and the communicative principle that every utterance conveys a presumption of its own optimal relevance. In a series of reasoning tasks (relational reasoning and the Wason Selection Task) as well as a verbal production task, they show that cognitive effects and effort interact as predicted by Relevance Theory.
Orna Peleg, Rachel Giora and Ofer Fein argue in chapter 8 that the process of lexical disambiguation involves two distinct operations (a) a bottom-up process that accesses the potential interpretations of a term in an order that reflects the salience of each interpretation, and (b) a top-down process that runs in parallel to the bottom-up process and has the potential of predicting (facilitating) certain interpretations, without being able to block highly salient by contextually irrelevant interpretations. The authors present 4 experiments in support of this view.
In Chapter 9, Seana Coulson offers a comprehensive introduction into how neurophysiological investigations using Event Related Potentials (ERPs) can contribute to pragmatic theories. Coulson describes ERP's various components and the aspects of comprehension that each of these components is sensitive to. She then reviews neurophysiological studies on joke interpretation and metaphor integration and she suggests how ERPs can be used to investigate other semantic/pragmatic issues such as the distinction between what is said and speaker meaning.
In Chapter 10, Josie Bernicot and Virginie Laval investigate the development of speech acts and specifically of children's ability to recognise that a promise has been made. The authors emphasize that one must bear in mind that language is a communication system and that language competence is the acquisition and use of this system. They argue that in order to identify what counts as a promise, children use both textual (linguistic) and contextual cues. In their first experiment they discuss the promise fulfilment preparatory condition and show that 3- and 6-year old children's comprehension of promises is facilitated in prototypical situations whose preparatory conditions is clearly satisfied. In a second experiment, the authors show that there is a tight link between linguistic (tense) and contextual cues and that children seem to be sensitive to the latter sooner than to the former (at age 3 vs. age 6).
In Chapter 11, Simon J. Handley and Aidan Feeney investigate the effect of pragmatic constraints on reasoning with 'even-if' utterances. Within the framework of mental models (Johnson-Laird, 1983) it is argued that many reasoning errors arise because people do not represent all the potential models that are warranted by a given set of conclusions. The authors argue that this partial representation can occur from two processes: either (a) the initial representation of all possible models and the subsequent blocking of some of them, based on pragmatic factors, or (b) the initial representation of only one model and the subsequent addition of new models based on pragmatic factors. They present two studies in the area of deductive reasoning that argue for the second option and they conclude their paper with a very interesting discussion on necessary and plausible inferences. Whereas the psychology of reasoning has focussed on necessary inferences that must follow if the premises are true, everyday communication relies much more on inferences that are only probable. Investigations in the area of experimental pragmatics are in a position to study such inferences, and bring the study of reasoning much closer to everyday interaction.
PART 3: the Case of Scalar Implicatures.
Similarly to Part 2, chapters 12 to 15 present current investigations in experimental pragmatics. Instead of addressing a wide range of topics, these chapters all focus on the case of scalar implicatures (henceforth SIs: some of the Fs>>some but not all of the Fs; A or B >> A or B but not both). Two types of accounts are broadly contrasted, contextual accounts that emphasize the pragmatic, context-dependent nature of the inference (exemplified in the case of Relevance Theory), and default accounts (proposed by Levinson 2000, Chierchia 2001/2004 i.a.) that emphasize the automaticity and structural-dependency of implicatures.
In Chapter 12, Anne Bezuidenhout and Robin Morris contrast the predictions of Relevance Theory and the default account brought forward by Levinson (2000). Bezuidenhout and Morris record eye-movements of participants reading SI triggers ('Some books had colour pictures.') and dependent expressions, ('In fact all of them did...'). Their studies support an underspecification view, where the scalar term is not interpreted with an SI until and unless there is compelling information that makes generating the inference necessary. They argue that whereas Relevance Theory is able to account for the data, it is actually possible to construe default accounts in such a way as to be able to account for them too. This paper exemplifies how one can make psycholinguistic predictions based on theoretical accounts, and engage into an informed discussion of what assumptions the theoretical accounts must make in order to accommodate for the empirical evidence.
In Chapter 13 Gennaro Chierchia, Maria Theresa Guasti, Andrea Gualmini, Luisa Meroni, Stephen Crain and Francesca Foppolo present evidence from the acquisition and adult processing of scalar terms that support a novel account, the Semantic Core Model (henceforth SCM; proposed by Chierchia, 2001/2004). Contrary to the widespread idea originating from Grice (1975), that pragmatic principles operate post-propositionally, after the truth-conditions of the root sentence have been computed, the SCM predicts that the computation of SIs takes place locally, sub-propositionally. This is a default account, but a rather more sophisticated than the one suggested by Levinson (2000). Instead of arguing that SIs are generated by default and potentially cancelled when they are not licensed by the context, the SCM emphasizes that what is generated by default is the informationally stronger interpretation of the scalar term. In upward-entailing structures, the stronger interpretation is the one with the SI (e.g. A or B but not both), but in downward-entailing structures it is the one without the SI (e.g. A or B or even both). The authors present three studies that indicate that children are sensitive to the direction of entailment of the structure, and that child and adult performance cannot be accounted by the standard Gricean post-propositional account.
In Chapter 14 Ira Noveck contrasts Relevance Theory to Levinson's default account on SIs. Both sides have made explicit processing predictions on a range of topics and Noveck discusses what these might mean for the case of SIs: according to Levinson's default account, one might expect that SIs are generated automatically, without effort; and when participants interpret a scalar term without an SI, they must have generated the SI by default and then cancelled, rather than not generated it at all. Moreover, on this default account SIs might appear early on in the course of child language development. According to a Relevance Theory account, one might expect that SIs are effortful pragmatic inferences that are costly in terms of processing resources. This cost is balanced by the gains in terms of informativeness. As a result of being effortful, one might expect that SIs will not appear early on in acquisition, and that by manipulating task demands in order to allow people less/more time to process the scalar terms, will affect the number of SIs participants generate. The predictions of Relevance Theory are verified in a comprehensive range of studies on child acquisition, adult reaction times and neurophysiological ERP investigations.
In the last chapter of the book, Anne Reboul presents a novel task that investigates how people interpret comparative utterances with narrow negation such as ''Better red wine than no wine''. Participants have to infer the speaker's preference and what she was actually given. Reboul illustrates how global pragmatic accounts (an instance of which is Relevance theory) and local default accounts (e.g. Levinson's) make different predictions, and she presents two experiments that support global pragmatic accounts.
CRITICAL EVALUATION
The book has received high praise from both experimentalists and theoreticians, including Philip Johnson-Laird and Francois Recanati, who have hailed it as a landmark in the development of Experimental Pragmatics. A detailed evaluation can be found in Rick Nouwen's review of the 2004 hardbound edition of the book for LINGUIST List (available online at http://cf.linguistlist.org/cfdocs/new-website/LL-WorkingDirs/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?SubID=54034).
In this review, instead of an overall evaluation, I will address four specific questions:
(A) Is there a substantial connection between the papers that merits grouping them in a single volume and branding a new field of inquiry?
(B) If so, is the volume indeed representative of what could be called experimental pragmatics?
(C) Is experimental pragmatics more of a promise for future scientific advances or does it already deliver some concrete and clear findings that linguists and philosophers could take into account?
(D) Even if there are concrete experimental findings, do these data constitute relevant evidence for linguistic-pragmatics, or could they be dismissed as part of performance (rather than pragmatic competence per se)?
Specifically, (A) Is there a substantial connection between the papers that merits grouping them in a single volume and branding a new field of inquiry?
The answer is a straightforward 'yes'. The contributions in the volume are on a wide range of topics that cover most of the traditional issues in pragmatics: reference, speech acts, implicatures, metaphor, the role of context in disambiguation, the interpretation of conditionals and quantifiers among others. Clearly, from the theoretical side, these contributions all fall within the scope of pragmatics narrowly defined as the study of 'how linguistic properties and context factors interact in the interpretation of utterances' (p. 1). The experimental methodologies used in this book are also quite extensive, including single sentence evaluation, truth-value judgments and picture matching tasks in language acquisition; categorical or graded judgments in off-line adult processing; reading and response time measures, priming, and eye-movement recordings in on-line adult processing; ERPs in adult neurophysiological investigations. The combination of a narrowly defined pragmatics discipline with the experimental techniques results in a book where many of the chapters can be in direct dialogue with each other: for example, not only are indirect speech acts, metaphor and scalar implicatures conceptually related in pragmatic theory, but one can also compare the time-course and acquisition of these inferences by comparing the contributions of Gibbs, Glucksberg and Noveck to the volume.
Francois Recanati in his comments on the volume, as well as the editors talk about experimental pragmatics as a new field. What would the criteria for a branding new field be? My intuitive answer is that there ought to be a distinct area of inquiry and/or a distinct methodology. Neither of these are novel in ExPrag. It is rather the combination of them that is unique. In this sense one can definitely talk about a new field. I personally would be more comfortable about talking about a new 'discipline' when (a) ExPrag investigations pinpoint a range of new theoretically relevant phenomena, in addition to simply addressing issues that have already been raised in the pragmatics literature, and when (b) besides using the standard psycholinguistic and reasoning methodologies, ExPrag gives rise to its own ad hoc experimental paradigms. There is already evidence that ExPrag has contributed to both issues (see chapter 1 on Clark's notion of common ground and the given-new contract and chapter 2 on Gibbs' ad hoc to ExPrag methodologies). One can be quite optimistic that the revived interest in ExPrag will contribute to further progress along these lines.
This discussion on whether ExPrag can be considered a new discipline of its own should not conceal the wider picture: ExPrag is not an attempt to introduce a new field and further divide the already entrenched fields of enquiry. It is clearly an attempt to unify two related disciplines, linguistic-pragmatics and psychology, that have often been unnecessarily orthogonal to its other. In this sense, ExPrag is in the forefront of a tradition in cognitive science in general, and language research specifically, that tries to provide a uniform account of linguistic competence as well as behaviour. (B) If indeed we can talk of Experimental Pragmatics as a new and distinct discipline, is the volume representative of the field?
With regards to the linguistic-pragmatic scope of this volume, the papers offer investigations on almost every area of pragmatic inquiry. A notable absence is the area of presupposition. However, to the best of my knowledge, presuppositions are not discussed in this volume simply because there is little (or perhaps none at all) empirical research in this area (and it is perhaps worth wondering whether this is just an accident or there is something inherent in presuppositions that hinders experimental investigation). Hopefully, future investigations will fill this gap.
With regards to the experimental scope of the volume, the papers employ methodologies from language acquisition, off- and on-line adult processing, neurophysiology and reasoning. This range of experimental paradigms is definitely representative of the empirical fields. However, the chapters do not exhaust the relevant experimental methodologies. Two more areas are relevant to the ExPrag enterprise (1) investigations on impaired populations, either adults (e.g. patients with brain lesions that can potentially help localise brain areas that are involved in pragmatic processing; see Bloom, & Obler, 1998; Kasher, Batori, Soroker, Graves, & Zaidel, 1999 i.a.) or atypically developing children (e.g. Autistic Spectrum Disorder, Specific Language Impairment; see Bishop, 2000; Happe 1993 i.a.) that can reveal the developmental stages of pragmatic abilities, and (2) research in the area of sentence processing that investigates the incremental interpretation of linguistic material. For example, investigations in the latter area have shown that pragmatic principles and information from linguistic and situational context can affect parsing from the earliest possible stage advocating against a conception of pragmatics as a secondary system (Altmann & Steedman, 1988; Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995 i.a.) without them being the only relevant factor. There are further studies in this literature on whether people can make use of the Gricean maxims of Quantity when incrementally assigning reference (Sedivy, Tanenhaus, Chambers, and Carlson, 1999) which have initiated a debate on whether humans are fully 'Gricean' or not (Engelhardt, Bailey, & Ferreira, 2006). These areas are directly relevant to experimental pragmatics, and it would be beneficial to represent them in future reviews of the field.
(C) Is experimental pragmatics more of a promise for future scientific advances or does it already deliver some concrete and clear findings that linguists and philosophers could take into account?
Clearly the answer is 'both'. Different chapters of the book reflect research that is at different stages. The chapters in the 'Pioneering Approaches' section summarise the results of research that has been ongoing of years and has to offer conclusive findings. To choose a few examples, chapter 4 by Sam Glucksberg reviews studies on metaphor that argue against the literal-interpretation-first hypothesis that postulates that metaphors arise as implicatures out of the defectiveness of the literal interpretation. On the contrary these studies indicate that the contextually appropriate interpretation is selected automatically, without any processing cost that would be entailed by inferences that arise out of secondary processes. Similarly, Gibbs' studies on indirect speech acts (chapter 3) clearly show that in appropriately constrained contexts indirect speech acts are not interpreted via accessing and subsequently rejecting the primary illocutionary force, but rather through a short-circuited process. Furthermore, Clark and Bangerter (chapter 1) demonstrate that establishing and maintaining references involves engaging in joint attention and speaker/listener cooperation to an extent that cannot be accounted for non-fully-pragmatic theories of reference. It is hard to see how these findings are not directly and essentially relevant to theoretical discussions of metaphors, speech acts and reference as well as psycholinguistic investigations. These chapters present an established paradigm for investigating these questions and offer conclusive results that can be incorporated in current research programmes and of course undergraduate and graduate courses.
Other contributions in the volume reflect promising ongoing research. Chapters 12 to 14 in Part 3 on Scalar Implicatures (henceforth SIs), are such a case. There is suggestive evidence that scalar terms are interpreted without an SI in the early stages of language development. There is also evidence from adult processing that generating an SI comes with a processing cost rather than being an automatic and effortless process. These investigations have initiated a growing number of studies. Studies in acquisition (Guasti, Chierchia, Crain, Foppolo, Gualmini, & Meroni, 2005; Foppolo, Guasti & Chierchia, submitted; Papafragou & Musolino, 2003; Pouscoulous & Noveck, submitted) and in adult processing (Bott & Noveck, 2004; Breheny, Katsos & Williams in press; Katsos, Breheny & Williams 2005; Noveck & Posada, 2003 i.a.) have lent further support to the empirical findings reported in this volume to the extent that there is a growing consensus on both the pattern of acquisition and the time-course of SIs. The emphasis in now on the theoretical debate between contextual and default theories of SIs, and how they can account for the data. The case of Scalar Implicatures is exemplifying work in progress that can make promising contributions to both theoretical and empirical disciplines.
(D) Even if there are concrete experimental findings, do these data constitute relevant evidence for linguistic-pragmatics, or could they be dismissed as part of performance (rather than pragmatic competence per se)?
Of course, the critical issue is whether philosophical accounts of language, and linguistic research on pragmatic competence should be concerned with experimental findings IN PRINCIPLE. It is possible to see that a similar question has been raised in other areas of linguistics, and especially syntax, where the divide between competence and performance has lead a number of people to claim that psycholinguistic data are part of performance, and therefore irrelevant to linguistic theories of competence (for a critical discussion see Newmeyer, 2005). It would be outside the scope of this review to discuss this issue. But clearly, it is a strong conviction of every contributor to this volume that studies on pragmatic performance are a source of information about competence per se.
This discussion brings us to the last issue I would like to raise: even if experiments are indeed relevant for linguistic-pragmatics, how do we relate the empirical findings to theoretical accounts? On the one hand, it is linguists themselves that underscore the relevance of psycholinguistic evidence to linguistic-pragmatics (e.g. for the case of SIs see Chierchia 2001/2004; Levinson, 2000; Wilson & Sperber 2003 i.a.). On the other hand, what experiments can falsify or not is a psycholinguistic model. There is always the issue of whether a certain psycholinguistic model is an accurate/reasonable 'translation' of a given linguistic theory into psycholinguistic terms. This issue is raised particularly in the contributions of Sanford & Moxey (chapter 6) and Bezuidenhout & Morris (chapter 12). In the end of the day, more than one linguistic-pragmatic theories may be able to account for the psycholinguistic data. The issue then becomes, which theory can account for the evidence straightforwardly, by making less ad hoc assumptions. This is of course a matter open to interpretation; at least the process of engaging into this discussion should be beneficial in making explicit all the underlying assumptions.
Overall, since its publication, this volume has been hailed for its importance in the flourishing field of Experimental Pragmatics. There has been a series of interrelated ExPrag conferences, (2001 in Lyon, 2003 in Milan, 2005 in Cambridge, as well as a forthcoming workshop in Brussels (June 2006)), and there have been ExPrag workshops in major conferences (the 9th IPrA in Riva, Experimental Linguistics in Athens). The growing interest in the discipline is reflected in the call for papers for special issues on experimental pragmatics in the 'Journal of Semantics' and 'First Language' as well as in the development of a dedicated website (www.experimentalpragmatics.org). This book is consistently cited in these activities and it is one of the major cornerstones that contribute to the growth of the Experimental Pragmatics enterprise. REFERENCES:
Altmann, G. & Steedman, M. (1988). Interaction with context during human sentence processing. Cognition, 38, 419-439.
Bloom, R. L., & Obler, L. K. (1998). Pragmatic breakdown in patients with left and right brain damage: Clinical implications. In M. Paradis (Ed.), Pragmatics in neurogenic communication disorders (pp. 11–20). Oxford: Elsevier Science.
Bishop, D.V.M. (2000). Pragmatic language impairment: A correlate of SLI, a distinct subgroup, or part of the autistic continuum? In D.V.M. Bishop & L.B. Leonard (Eds.), Speech and language impairments in children: Causes, characteristics, intervention and outcome (pp. 99–113). Hove, UK: Psychology Press.
Bott, L. & Noveck, I .A. (2004). Some utterances are underinformative: The onset and time course of scalar inferences. Journal of Memory and Language, 51, 437-457
Breheny, R., Katsos, N. & Williams, J. in (press) Are Generalised Scalar Implicatures Generated by Default? An on-line investigation into the role of context in generating pragmatic inferences. Cognition
Chierchia, G. (2001/2004). Scalar Implicatures, Polarity Phenomena, and the Syntax/Pragmatics Interface. In A. Belletti Structures and Beyond. Oxford University Press.
Engelhardt, P., Bailey, D, & Ferreira, F. (2006) Do speakers and listeners observe the Gricean Maxim of Quantity? Journal of Memory and Language
Foppolo, F., Guasti, M.T. and Chierchia, G. (submitted) Scalar implicatures in child language: failure, strategies and lexical factors
Grice, P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole and J.L. Morgan, (eds.): Syntax and Semantics, Vol.3, Speech Acts, New York, Academic Press, 1975, 41-58. Reprinted in P. Grice: Studies in the Way of Words, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1989.
Grodner, D., & Sedivy, J. (2004). The effect of speaker-specific information on pragmatic inferences. In N. Pearlmutter, & E. Gibson (Eds.), The processing and acquisition of reference. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Guasti, M.T., Chierchia, G., Crain, S., Foppolo F., Gualmini, A., and Meroni L. (2005); Why children and adults sometimes (but not always) compute implicatures. Language and Cognitive Processes, 20 (5), 667-696
Happe, F.G.E. (1993). Communicative competence and theory of mind in autism: a test of relevance theory. Cognition 48, 101–119.
Johnson-Laird, P.N. (1983). Mental Models. Cambridge: CUP
Kasher, A., Batori, G., Soroker, N., Graves, D. & Zaidel, E. (1999). Effects of Right- and Left-Hemisphere Damage on Understanding Conversational Implicatures. Brain and Language 68, 566–590
Katsos, N., Breheny, R. & Williams, J. (2005). The Interaction of Structural and Contextual Constraints During the On-line Generation of Scalar Inferences. In B. Bara, L. Barsalou and M. Bucciarelli (Eds.), Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (1108-13). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Levinson, S. (2000). Presumptive Meanings. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.
Lewis, D. K. (1969). Convention: A Philosophical Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Noveck, I. & A. Posada (2003). Characterising the time course of an implicature. Brain and Language, 85, 203-210.
Newmeyer, F. (2005). Parameters, performance and the explanation of typological generalizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Papafragou, A. & Musolino J. (2003). Scalar implicatures: experiments at the semantics/pragmatics interface. Cognition, 86, 253-282.
Pouscoulous, N. & Noveck I. (submitted) Investigating Scalar Implicature in Child Language
Sedivy, J., Tanenhaus, M., Chambers, C., & Carlson, G. (1999). Achieving incremental semantic interpretation through contextual representation. Cognition, 71, 109-147.
Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M. J., Eberhard, K. M., & Sedivy, J. C. (1995). Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension. Science, 268.1632–1634.
Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (2003). Relevance theory. Pp. 607-632 in L. Horn, & G. Ward (Eds.), Handbook of pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell.
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ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
ABOUT THE REVIEWER Napoleon Katsos is a Ph.D. student at the Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics, Cambridge, working on the processing of scalar implicatures by adults in English and Greek. His research employs off-line questionnaires and on-line reading time measures to investigate the effect of structural and contextual factors on the generation of logical and ad hoc scalar implicatures.
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