Implicatures

The study of natural language meaning revolves around the problem of how one person can communicate their thoughts to another successfully, even when there are in principle infinitely many thoughts, many of which the speakers will have never previously attempted to communicate. Grice’s solution to this problem was to keep the meaning of natural language expressions as close as possible to their logical equivalents. In doing this, he argued that much of linguistic meaning comes about through pragmatic reasoning about the intentions of the speaker, after the literal, logical meaning of a sentence has been computed. Traditionally, the difference between the canceling and strengthening ability of the implicature and the inability to do so in entailments served to place the former squarely in the domain of post-compositional pragmatics, the latter in the domain of semantics. In spoken languages, scalar implicatures are one of the experimentally most studied phenomena at the interface of semantics and pragmatics, a number of good reasons.