Poznan09

Processing of implicatures

Eytan Zweig

One of the important, yet often overlooked, aspects of Gricean and Neo-Gricean theories of conversational implicature, and especially scalar implicatures, is that they make explicit use of a notion of on-line calculation, where a speaker (or hearer) is expected to make explicit judgements in their mind about the appropriateness use of a sentence to a situation and make comparisons to other sentences. As a result, there is a growing body of psycholinguistic (and neurolinguistic) research aimed at testing whether we can see the effects of such a calculation. This course will examine this literature and discuss whether and how psycholinguistic results can inform the theoretical debate.

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