Scalar implicatures (SIs), according to a theoretical tradition that goes back

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

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According to recent work in the new field of lexical pragmatics, the meanings of words are frequently pragmatically adjusted and fine-tuned in context, so that their contribution to the proposition expressed is different from their lexically encoded sense. Well-known examples include lexical narrowing (e.g. ‘drink ’ used to mean ALCOHOLIC DRINK), approximation (or loosening) (e.g. ‘flat’ used to mean RELATIVELY FLAT) and metaphorical extension (e.g. ‘bulldozer ’ used to mean FORCEFUL PERSON). These three phenomena are often studied in isolation from each other and given quite distinct kinds of explanation. In this chapter, we will propose a more unified account. We will try to show that narrowing, loosening and metaphorical extension are simply different outcomes of a single interpretive process which creates an ad hoc concept, or occasion-specific sense, based on interaction among encoded concepts, contextual information and pragmatic expectations or principles. We will outline an inferential account of the lexical adjustment process using the framework of relevance theory, and compare it with some alternative accounts.

The article aims to give an overview about the application of Optimality Theory (OT) to the domain of pragmatics. In the introductory part we discuss different ways to view the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics. Rejecting the doctrine of literal meaning we conform to (i) semantic underdetermination and (ii) contextualism (the idea that the mechanism of pragmatic interpretation is crucial both for determining what the speaker says and what he means). Taking the assumptions (i) and (ii) as essential requisites for a natural theory of pragmatic interpretation, section 2 introduces the two main views conforming to these assumptions: Relevance theory, Levinson’s theory of presumptive meanings, and the Neo-Gricean approach. In section 3 we explain the general paradigm of OT and the idea of bidirectional optimization. We show how the idea of optimal interpretation can be used to restructure the core ideas of these three different approaches. Further, we argue that bidirectional OT has the potential to account both for the synchronic and the diachronic perspective on pragmatic interpretation. Section 4 lists relevant examples of using the framework of bidirectional optimization in the domain of pragmatics. Section 5 provides some general conclusions. Modeling both for the synchronic and the diachronic perspective on pragmatics opens the way for a deeper understanding of the idea of naturalization and (cultural) embodiment in the context of natural language interpretation. 1