This paper considers the implications for philosophy of some recent approaches to pragmatics (with a focus on relevance theory) and makes two main points. First, the widening gap between sentence meaning and speaker’s meaning increasingly brings into question a basic assumption of much philosophy of language: that linguistic semantics provides direct insight into the structure of human thoughts. Second, by describing comprehension as a richly context-dependent form of inference, pragmatics provides an illustration of how we might approach central cognitive processes, which have been seen by Fodor as a major mystery for cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind. 1

A variety of expressions in natural language give rise to scalar implicatures in appropriate contexts. The weak quantifier some, for instance, even though semantically compatible with all, is standardly used to communicate 'some but not all' (A: 'Did you eat your sandwiches? - B: 'I ate some'). Previous research has suggested that young children have difficulty computing implicatures of this sort (Noveck, I. Cognition 78 (2001); Papafragou, A. and J. Musolino, Cognition 86 (2003); among others). We report here results from an experiment which shows that preschoolers can spontaneously compute scalar implicatures in a variety of environments. These environments include the well-known quanfificafional cases, but also scales licensed by encyclopedic or ad hoc properties of the objects in the referential scene (A: )id you eat your sandwich?' - B: 'I ate the cheese'). Our findings provide compelling evidence for children's early ostensive-inferential abilities in recovering implicated aspects of the speaker's meaning.

In reports filed from several fronts in the semantics/pragmatics border wars, I seek to bolster the loyalist (neo-)Gricean forces against various recent revisionist sorties, including (but not limited to) the relevance-theoretic view on which the maxims (or more specifically their sole surviving descendant, the principle of relevance) inform truth-conditional content through the determination of “explicatures”, Levinson’s defense of implicatures serving as input to logical form, recent arguments by Mira Ariel for a semantic treatment of the upper bound (‘not all’) for propositions of the form Most F are G, and Chierchia’s proposal to reanalyze implicatures as part of compositional semantics. I argue for drawing the semantics/pragmatics boundary in a relatively traditional way, maintaining a constrained characterization of what is said, while adopting a variant of Kent Bach’s position on “impliciture” and supporting the Gricean conception of implicature as an aspect of speaker meaning, as opposed to its reconstruction in terms of default inference or utterance interpretation. I survey current controversies concerning the meaning and acquisition of disjunction and other scalar operators, the relation of subcontrariety and its implications for lexicalization, the nature of polarity licensing, and the innateness controversy. In each case, I seek to emphasize the signiÞcance of the generalizations that a (neo-)classical pragmatic approach enables us to capture. For some time, David Kaplan (cf. Kaplan 1978:223) has taken to harking nostalgically back to

We investigate the interaction of structural and contextual constraints on the on-line generation of three types of Scalar Implicature, (a) the disjunction: “A or B ”>> “either A or B but not both”, (b) the partitive NP: “some of the Fs”>> “at least one but not all of the Fs ” and (c) ad hoc context dependent scales. In theoretical linguistics, according to the structural approach (Chierchia, 2004; Levinson 2000) Scalar Implicatures (SIs) are generated whenever certain constraints on the semantic properties of the linguistic structure are satisfied; SIs have to be cancelled subsequently if information from the discourse context indicates that the SI is not felicitous. According to the pragmatic approach, structural properties are a necessary but not sufficient condition, since for SIs to be generated there ought to be further contextual constraints that make the inference relevant (Recanati, 2003; Sperber & Wilson, 1995). The linguistic debate is reflected in the psycholinguistic discussion on the modular versus interactive nature of the human parser. The structural approach presupposes a modular and serial parser and the pragmatic an interactive one which allows multiple constraints to operate from the earliest stage. Recent psycholinguistic studies on SIs are not reaching a consensus. Single sentence truth value judgment tasks (Bott & Noveck,

concepts; categorization; space; number Possessing a language is one of the central features that distinguishes humans from other species. Many people share the intuition that they think “in ” language, hence that the absence of language would, ipso facto, be the absence of thought. One compelling version of this self-reflection is Helen Keller’s (1955) report that her recognition of the signed symbol for ‘water’ triggered thought processes which had theretofore-- and consequently-- been utterly absent. Statements to the same or related effect come from the most diverse intellectual sources: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world ” (Wittgenstein, 1922]; and “The fact of the matter is that the 'real world ' is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group” (Sapir, 1941, as cited in Whorf, 1956, p. 75). * We thank Jerry Fodor for a discussion of the semantics of raining, Ray Jackendoff for a discussion of phonology, as well as Dan Slobin and Dedre Gentner for their comments on this chapter. Much of our perspective derives from our collaborative work with

A scalable supervised algorithm

Our hypothesis is that reflective cognition is necessary to achieve expert level performance in certain skills, and that reflective cognition can be seen as a secondary task in skill acquisition. To investigate to what extent people use and acquire complex skills and strategies in the domains of reasoning about others and natural language use, an experiment was conducted in which it was beneficial for participants to have a mental model of their opponent, and to be aware of pragmatic inferences. Individual differences in the use of complex skills and strategies, that support our hypothesis, were found.

This work investigates children’s early semantic representations of gradable adjectives (GAs) and proposes that infants perform a probabilistic analysis of the input to learn about abstract differences within this category. I first demonstrate that children as young as age three distinguish between relative (e.g., big, long), maximum standard absolute (e.g., full, straight), and minimum standard absolute (e.g., spotted, bumpy) GAs in the way that the standard of comparison is set and how it interacts with the discourse context. I then ask if adverbs enable infants to learn these differences. In a corpus analysis, I demonstrate that statistically significant patterns of adverbial modification are available to the language learner: restricted adverbs (e.g., completely) are more likely than non-restricted adverbs (e.g., very) to select for maximal GAs with bounded scales. Non-maximal GAs, which are more likely to be modified by adverbs in general, are more likely to be modified by a narrower range, predominantly composed of intensifiers (e.g., very). I then ask if language learners recruit this information when learning new adjectives. In a word learning task employing the preferential looking paradigm, I demonstrate that 30-month-olds use adverbial modifiers they are not necessarily producing to assign an interpretation to novel adjectives. Adjectives modified by completely are assigned an

number expressions (one, two, three...) have standardly been considered similar to quantifiers (some, a few, all).

Recent research on children’s inferencing has found that although adults typically adopt the pragmatic interpretation of some (implying not all), 5- to 9-year-olds often prefer the semantic interpretation of the quantifier (meaning possibly all). Do these failures reflect a breakdown of pragmatic competence or the metalinguistic demands of prior tasks? In 3 experiments, the authors used the visual-world eye-tracking paradigm to elicit an implicit measure of adults ’ and children’s abilities to generate scalar implicatures. Although adults ’ eye-movements indicated that adults had interpreted some with the pragmatic inference, children’s looks suggested that children persistently interpreted some as compatible with all (Experiment 1). Nevertheless, both adults and children were able to quickly reject competitors that were inconsistent with the semantics of some; this confirmed the sensitivity of the paradigm (Experiment 2). Finally, adults, but not children, successfully distinguished between situations that violated the scalar implicature and those that did not (Experiment 3). These data demonstrate that children interpret quantifiers on the basis of their semantic content and fail to generate scalar implicatures during online language comprehension.