Prominent accounts of language use (those of Grice, Lewis, Stalnaker, Sperber and Wilson among others) have viewed basic communicative acts as essentially involving the attitudes of the participating agents. Developmental data poses a dilemma for these accounts, since it suggests children below age four are competent communicators but would lack the ability to conceptualise communication if philosophers and linguists are right about what communication is. This paper argues that this dilemma is quite serious and that these prominent accounts would be (...) undermined if an adequate more minimal alternative were available. Just such a minimalist account of communication is offered, drawing on ideas from relevance theory and situation theory. (shrink)

The structural approach to alternatives :669–690, 2007; Fox and Katzir in Nat Lang Semant 19:87–107, 2011; Katzir in Semantics, pragmatics and the case of scalar implicatures, Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp 40–71, 2014) is the most developed attempt in the literature at solving the symmetry problem of scalar implicatures. Problematic data with indirect and particularised scalar implicatures have however been raised :249–270, 2015). To address these problems, Trinh and Haida proposed to augment the theory with the Atomicity Constraint. Here we show (...) that this constraint falls short of explaining minimal variants of the original problems, and moreover that it runs into trouble with the inferences of sentences involving gradable adjectives like full and empty. We furthermore discuss how the structural approach suffers at times from the problem of ‘too many lexical alternatives’ pointed out by Swanson :31–36, 2010), and at other times from the opposite problem of ‘too few lexical alternatives’. These three problems epitomise the challenge of constructing just enough alternatives under the structural approach to solve the symmetry problem in full generality. Finally, we also sketch another recent attempt at solving the symmetry problem, Bergen et al., 2016), which is based on relative informativity and complexity. We argue that Bergen et al. do not provide a general solution to the symmetry problem either, by pointing to some of the open problematic cases that remain for this approach as well. We conclude that while important progress has been made in the theory of alternatives for scalar implicatures in the last few years, a full solution to the symmetry problem has not yet been attained. (shrink)

Plain disjunctive sentences, such as _The mystery box contains a blue ball or a yellow ball_, typically imply that the speaker does not know which of the two disjuncts is true. This is known as an ignorance inference. We can distinguish between two aspects of this inference: the negated universal upper bound part (i.e., the speaker is uncertain about each disjunct), which we call uncertainty, and the existential lower bound part (i.e., the speaker considers each disjunct possible), which we call (...) possibility. In the traditional approach, uncertainty is derived as a primary implicature, from which possibility follows. In this paper, we report on two experiments using a sentence-picture verification task based on the mystery box paradigm that challenge the traditional implicature approach. Our findings show that possibility can arise without uncertainty, and we thus call for a reevaluation of the traditional view of disjunction and ignorance inferences. Our experimental findings are related to similar results involving disjunction in embedded contexts and pave the way for alternative theories that can account for the observed patterns of inference derivation in a unified fashion. We discuss how recent implicature and non-implicature theories can account for the derivation of existential lower bound inferences without the presence of negated universal upper bound inferences. (shrink)

This paper considers some issues for traditional and radical views of the semantic content of utterances. It suggests that, as the radical view denies that linguistic meaning solely determines explicit content, it is required to come up with an alternative account of content. We focus on cognitively oriented radical theories and argue that none of the current alternatives for delimiting content is adequate. An alternative radical account of content is sketched. We also consider Stanley's (2000) binding argument in support of (...) the traditional view and suggest that it fails as it is based on an overly strong conception of binding in natural language. (shrink)