17.2152, Review: (Pragmatics: Noveck, Ira; Sperber, Dan (2006))

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Subject: 17.2152, Review: (Pragmatics: Noveck, Ira; Sperber, Dan (2006))

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1)
Date: 26-Jul-2006
From: Napoleon Katsos < nk248 at cam.ac.uk >
Subject: Experimental Pragmatics 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2006 20:17:04
From: Napoleon Katsos < nk248 at cam.ac.uk >
Subject: Experimental Pragmatics 
 


Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/17/17-602.html 

EDITORS: Noveck, Ira A; Sperber, Dan 
TITLE: Experimental Pragmatics
SERIES: Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition
PUBLISHER: Palgrave Macmillan 
YEAR: 2006 

Napoleon Katsos, Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics,
University of Cambridge


INTRODUCTION
 
This book is a collection of papers in the area of experimental pragmatics,
the discipline which employs experimental methodologies developed in
psycholinguistics and the study of reasoning to investigate issues raised
in the linguistic-pragmatics literature. The aim of the book is threefold:
to show that such investigations have been taking place for at least 30
years now with substantial achievements, to identify new areas for
interdisciplinary research, and overall to give a 'brand name' to the area
and underscore the mutual benefits for experimental and theoretical
disciplines. 

The book begins with a detailed introduction by the editors which
delineates the scope of the discipline, the range of topics and the
methodologies used in the chapters. Noveck & Sperber argue that
experimental pragmatics (henceforth ExPrag) does not devalue the
traditional methods of pragmatic inquiry, or the range of psycholinguistic
interests. They argue for the complementariness of ExPrag with its
parent-disciplines, and underscore the mutual benefits for both
pragmaticians and psychologists. For the former, given years of conceptual
argumentation and judgments based on intuitions, ''it is hard to
find...crucial evidence that would clearly confirm one theory and
disconfirm another'' (p. 7). Moreover, since ''armchair theories owe much of
their appeal to their vagueness'' (p. 9) the experimental approach forces
theoreticians to make clear, precise and falsifiable hypotheses. On the
other hand, psycholinguistic theories can benefit from the comprehensive
and evenly detailed view of the phenomena discussed in the pragmatic
literature. For example, there is 'a wealth of psychological research on
metaphors, but implicatures remain largely untouched, when from a pragmatic
point of view, the two phenomena are of comparable importance' (p. 9). The
benefit for psychologists would be to make use of pragmatic concepts and
theories 'in order to better describe and explain a range of phenomena that
are clearly of a psycholinguistic nature, and to develop new experimental
paradigms' (p. 9). 

The contributed chapters are organised in three parts. The first part,
chapters 2-6, presents 'Pioneering Approaches', which involve researchers
that have made significant contributions in the area and are considered an
ideal example of the experimental pragmatic approach. The second and third
parts deal with current issues and identify new areas of research. The
second part, chapters 7-11, is devoted on a wide range of topics whereas
the third, chapters 12-15, involves studies focussing on scalar implicatures. 

A short summary of the chapters can be found in the introduction of the
book (chapter 1) as well as in a very informative LINGUIST List review of
the 2004 hardbound edition of the book by Rick Nouwen (available online at
 http://cf.linguistlist.org/cfdocs/new-website/LL-WorkingDirs/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?SubID=54034).

SUMMARY

PART 1: Pioneering approaches.

In the first chapter of Part 1, Herbert Clark and Adrian Bangerter discuss
how the study of reference has benefited from the interaction between
theoretical linguists, philosophers of language and experimentalists. The
authors discuss how reference was initially considered an autonomous
addressee-blind activity, with emphasis on the speaker (whose task is to
select a referent out of a set of alternatives). Clark and Bangerter argue
that the coordination condition, proposed by philosophers Grice (1975) and
Lewis (1979), is a significant step forward but still falls short of
describing the full richness of the phenomenon. Clark and Bangerter review
a number of studies that indicate that reference actually requires joint
speaker/hearer participation which is different than mere coordination.
They emphasize how three types of evidence (a) conceptual argumentation and
intuitive judgments, (b) observations from natural conversational
interactions and (c) experimental evidence, have been instrumental in
highlighting different aspects of reference, and argue for the overall
significance of being able to account for observations from natural
conversations.

In the second chapter, Ray Gibbs demonstrates how experimental
investigations have had a major contribution to pragmatics. He addresses
core issues in the semantics/pragmatics interface, including making and
understanding direct and indirect speech acts, understanding definite
descriptions and the distinction between what is said and speaker meaning.
The experimental findings from Gibbs' lab are directly informative for
hotly debated issues in pragmatics, for example arguing for the
short-circuited nature of indirect requests. Throughout the paper, Gibbs
emphasizes the contribution of experimental methodologies in the
development of testable, that is, falsifiable, pragmatic theories.
Similarly, he highlights the benefits for psychologists, since the use of
accurate psycholinguistic methods such as reading time paradigms and
priming have helped dispel concerns on whether it is possible to do good
psychology working in the area of pragmatics (as opposed to areas of core
grammar such as syntax, etc). 

In the third chapter, Sam Glucksberg investigates the processing of
metaphors and argues against a pervasive conception in the field of
psycholinguistics (which ultimately derives from theoretical linguistics)
that pragmatics is in some sense secondary to syntax and semantics.
Processing models that are inspired by Grice's and Searle's analysis of
metaphor as an implicature arising from a violation of the cooperative
principle, predict that the literal meaning of an expression is accessed
first (and effortlessly), while non-literal meaning emerges at a second
stage, as a result of the fact that the literal interpretation does not
satisfy the Cooperative Principle and maxims. Glucksberg presents several
experiments from his lab on metaphor comprehension and concept combination
that argue for the opposite, namely that pragmatic processes are not in any
psychologically meaningful sense secondary: they are not costly, nor
effortful, but rather exhibit the automaticity one would expect from
modular processes. 

In the fourth chapter, Guy Politzer proposes a macro- and micro-pragmatic
analysis of reasoning tasks. He indicates that pragmatics is informative
both for understanding the interaction of experimenters and participants
(which is a special case of conversation), as well as for analysing the
interpretation of the specific utterances of the experiment itself, the
premises, consequences, conclusions etc. By analysing some of the most
widely used tasks, Politzer pinpoints cases where pragmatic analysis shows
that what was apparently an erroneous response, was in fact a correct
response of participants that were behaving 'pragmatically' rather than
strictly logically. Politzer illustrates that the experimenter can make the
participants sensitive to either pragmatic / logical interpretations of the
task with the correct questions and probes, and illustrates that a thorough
understanding of pragmatics is necessary for interpreting reasoning tasks. 

The final chapter of Part 1 is contributed by Tony Sanford and Linda Moxey.
The aim of their work is to investigate how far linguistic theories of
quantifiers can take us towards a psychologically plausible model of
quantifier comprehension. They argue that an approach that is based on
communicative functions is better poised to account for the processing of
quantifiers than analytical theories. They draw on two properties of
quantifiers: (a) their ability to focus on a set of entities, either the
reference or complement set, and (b) their ability to deny certain
suppositions of an utterance. In a series of studies Sanford and Moxey
argue that it is these properties that can account for the processing of
quantifiers rather than analytical notions such as monotonicity. 

Parts 2 and 3 investigate current issues in Experimental Pragmatics. Part 2
presents a wide range of topics, whereas Part 3 is focussed on scalar
implicatures.

PART 2: Current Issues in Experimental Pragmatics

In chapter 7 of the book, Jean-Baptiste Van der Henst and Dan Sperber
present several studies that aim to provide strong experimental
confirmation for Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson 1995). They produce
falsifiable predictions based on the two principles of Relevance Theory,
the cognitive principle that human cognition is geared towards the
maximisation of relevance, and the communicative principle that every
utterance conveys a presumption of its own optimal relevance. In a series
of reasoning tasks (relational reasoning and the Wason Selection Task) as
well as a verbal production task, they show that cognitive effects and
effort interact as predicted by Relevance Theory. 

Orna Peleg, Rachel Giora and Ofer Fein argue in chapter 8 that the process
of lexical disambiguation involves two distinct operations (a) a bottom-up
process that accesses the potential interpretations of a term in an order
that reflects the salience of each interpretation, and (b) a top-down
process that runs in parallel to the bottom-up process and has the
potential of predicting (facilitating) certain interpretations, without
being able to block highly salient by contextually irrelevant
interpretations. The authors present 4 experiments in support of this view. 

In Chapter 9, Seana Coulson offers a comprehensive introduction into how
neurophysiological investigations using Event Related Potentials (ERPs) can
contribute to pragmatic theories. Coulson describes ERP's various
components and the aspects of comprehension that each of these components
is sensitive to. She then reviews neurophysiological studies on joke
interpretation and metaphor integration and she suggests how ERPs can be
used to investigate other semantic/pragmatic issues such as the distinction
between what is said and speaker meaning. 

In Chapter 10, Josie Bernicot and Virginie Laval investigate the
development of speech acts and specifically of children's ability to
recognise that a promise has been made. The authors emphasize that one must
bear in mind that language is a communication system and that language
competence is the acquisition and use of this system. They argue that in
order to identify what counts as a promise, children use both textual
(linguistic) and contextual cues. In their first experiment they discuss
the promise fulfilment preparatory condition and show that 3- and 6-year
old children's comprehension of promises is facilitated in prototypical
situations whose preparatory conditions is clearly satisfied. In a second
experiment, the authors show that there is a tight link between linguistic
(tense) and contextual cues and that children seem to be sensitive to the
latter sooner than to the former (at age 3 vs. age 6).

In Chapter 11, Simon J. Handley and Aidan Feeney investigate the effect of
pragmatic constraints on reasoning with 'even-if' utterances. Within the
framework of mental models (Johnson-Laird, 1983) it is argued that many
reasoning errors arise because people do not represent all the potential
models that are warranted by a given set of conclusions. The authors argue
that this partial representation can occur from two processes: either (a)
the initial representation of all possible models and the subsequent
blocking of some of them, based on pragmatic factors, or (b) the initial
representation of only one model and the subsequent addition of new models
based on pragmatic factors. They present two studies in the area of
deductive reasoning that argue for the second option and they conclude
their paper with a very interesting discussion on necessary and plausible
inferences. Whereas the psychology of reasoning has focussed on necessary
inferences that must follow if the premises are true, everyday
communication relies much more on inferences that are only probable.
Investigations in the area of experimental pragmatics are in a position to
study such inferences, and bring the study of reasoning much closer to
everyday interaction.

PART 3: the Case of Scalar Implicatures. 

Similarly to Part 2, chapters 12 to 15 present current investigations in
experimental pragmatics. Instead of addressing a wide range of topics,
these chapters all focus on the case of scalar implicatures (henceforth
SIs: some of the Fs>>some but not all of the Fs; A or B >> A or B but not
both). Two types of accounts are broadly contrasted, contextual accounts
that emphasize the pragmatic, context-dependent nature of the inference
(exemplified in the case of Relevance Theory), and default accounts
(proposed by Levinson 2000, Chierchia 2001/2004 i.a.) that emphasize the
automaticity and structural-dependency of implicatures. 

In Chapter 12, Anne Bezuidenhout and Robin Morris contrast the predictions
of Relevance Theory and the default account brought forward by Levinson
(2000). Bezuidenhout and Morris record eye-movements of participants
reading SI triggers ('Some books had colour pictures.') and dependent
expressions, ('In fact all of them did...'). Their studies support an
underspecification view, where the scalar term is not interpreted with an
SI until and unless there is compelling information that makes generating
the inference necessary. They argue that whereas Relevance Theory is able
to account for the data, it is actually possible to construe default
accounts in such a way as to be able to account for them too. This paper
exemplifies how one can make psycholinguistic predictions based on
theoretical accounts, and engage into an informed discussion of what
assumptions the theoretical accounts must make in order to accommodate for
the empirical evidence. 

In Chapter 13 Gennaro Chierchia, Maria Theresa Guasti, Andrea Gualmini,
Luisa Meroni, Stephen Crain and Francesca Foppolo present evidence from the
acquisition and adult processing of scalar terms that support a novel
account, the Semantic Core Model (henceforth SCM; proposed by Chierchia,
2001/2004). Contrary to the widespread idea originating from Grice (1975),
that pragmatic principles operate post-propositionally, after the
truth-conditions of the root sentence have been computed, the SCM predicts
that the computation of SIs takes place locally, sub-propositionally. This
is a default account, but a rather more sophisticated than the one
suggested by Levinson (2000). Instead of arguing that SIs are generated by
default and potentially cancelled when they are not licensed by the
context, the SCM emphasizes that what is generated by default is the
informationally stronger interpretation of the scalar term. In
upward-entailing structures, the stronger interpretation is the one with
the SI (e.g. A or B but not both), but in downward-entailing structures it
is the one without the SI (e.g. A or B or even both). The authors present
three studies that indicate that children are sensitive to the direction of
entailment of the structure, and that child and adult performance cannot be
accounted by the standard Gricean post-propositional account.  

In Chapter 14 Ira Noveck contrasts Relevance Theory to Levinson's default
account on SIs. Both sides have made explicit processing predictions on a
range of topics and Noveck discusses what these might mean for the case of
SIs: according to Levinson's default account, one might expect that SIs are
generated automatically, without effort; and when participants interpret a
scalar term without an SI, they must have generated the SI by default and
then cancelled, rather than not generated it at all. Moreover, on this
default account SIs might appear early on in the course of child language
development. According to a Relevance Theory account, one might expect that
SIs are effortful pragmatic inferences that are costly in terms of
processing resources. This cost is balanced by the gains in terms of
informativeness. As a result of being effortful, one might expect that SIs
will not appear early on in acquisition, and that by manipulating task
demands in order to allow people less/more time to process the scalar
terms, will affect the number of SIs participants generate. The predictions
of Relevance Theory are verified in a comprehensive range of studies on
child acquisition, adult reaction times and neurophysiological ERP
investigations. 

In the last chapter of the book, Anne Reboul presents a novel task that
investigates how people interpret comparative utterances with narrow
negation such as ''Better red wine than no wine''. Participants have to infer
the speaker's preference and what she was actually given. Reboul
illustrates how global pragmatic accounts (an instance of which is
Relevance theory) and local default accounts (e.g. Levinson's) make
different predictions, and she presents two experiments that support global
pragmatic accounts.


CRITICAL EVALUATION

The book has received high praise from both experimentalists and
theoreticians, including Philip Johnson-Laird and Francois Recanati, who
have hailed it as a landmark in the development of Experimental Pragmatics.
A detailed evaluation can be found in Rick Nouwen's review of the 2004
hardbound edition of the book for LINGUIST List (available online at
http://cf.linguistlist.org/cfdocs/new-website/LL-WorkingDirs/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?SubID=54034).

In this review, instead of an overall evaluation, I will address four
specific questions:

(A) Is there a substantial connection between the papers that merits
grouping them in a single volume and branding a new field of inquiry?

(B) If so, is the volume indeed representative of what could be called
experimental pragmatics?

(C) Is experimental pragmatics more of a promise for future scientific
advances or does it already deliver some concrete and clear findings that
linguists and philosophers could take into account?  

(D) Even if there are concrete experimental findings, do these data
constitute relevant evidence for linguistic-pragmatics, or could they be
dismissed as part of performance (rather than pragmatic competence per se)? 

Specifically, (A) Is there a substantial connection between the papers that
merits grouping them in a single volume and branding a new field of inquiry?

The answer is a straightforward 'yes'. The contributions in the volume are
on a wide range of topics that cover most of the traditional issues in
pragmatics: reference, speech acts, implicatures, metaphor, the role of
context in disambiguation, the interpretation of conditionals and
quantifiers among others. Clearly, from the theoretical side, these
contributions all fall within the scope of pragmatics narrowly defined as
the study of 'how linguistic properties and context factors interact in the
interpretation of utterances' (p. 1). The experimental methodologies used
in this book are also quite extensive, including single sentence
evaluation, truth-value judgments and picture matching tasks in language
acquisition; categorical or graded judgments in off-line adult processing;
reading and response time measures, priming, and eye-movement recordings in
on-line adult processing; ERPs in adult neurophysiological investigations.
The combination of a narrowly defined pragmatics discipline with the
experimental techniques results in a book where many of the chapters can be
in direct dialogue with each other: for example, not only are indirect
speech acts, metaphor and scalar implicatures conceptually related in
pragmatic theory, but one can also compare the time-course and acquisition
of these inferences by comparing the contributions of Gibbs, Glucksberg and
Noveck to the volume. 

Francois Recanati in his comments on the volume, as well as the editors
talk about experimental pragmatics as a new field. What would the criteria
for a branding new field be? My intuitive answer is that there ought to be
a distinct area of inquiry and/or a distinct methodology. Neither of these
are novel in ExPrag. It is rather the combination of them that is unique.
In this sense one can definitely talk about a new field. I personally would
be more comfortable about talking about a new 'discipline' when (a) ExPrag
investigations pinpoint a range of new theoretically relevant phenomena, in
addition to simply addressing issues that have already been raised in the
pragmatics literature, and when (b) besides using the standard
psycholinguistic and reasoning methodologies, ExPrag gives rise to its own
ad hoc experimental paradigms. There is already evidence that ExPrag has
contributed to both issues (see chapter 1 on Clark's notion of common
ground and the given-new contract and chapter 2 on Gibbs' ad hoc to ExPrag
methodologies). One can be quite optimistic that the revived interest in
ExPrag will contribute to further progress along these lines.

This discussion on whether ExPrag can be considered a new discipline of its
own should not conceal the wider picture: ExPrag is not an attempt to
introduce a new field and further divide the already entrenched fields of
enquiry. It is clearly an attempt to unify two related disciplines,
linguistic-pragmatics and psychology, that have often been unnecessarily
orthogonal to its other. In this sense, ExPrag is in the forefront of a
tradition in cognitive science in general, and language research
specifically, that tries to provide a uniform account of linguistic
competence as well as behaviour. 
  
(B) If indeed we can talk of Experimental Pragmatics as a new and distinct
discipline, is the volume representative of the field?

With regards to the linguistic-pragmatic scope of this volume, the papers
offer investigations on almost every area of pragmatic inquiry. A notable
absence is the area of presupposition. However, to the best of my
knowledge, presuppositions are not discussed in this volume simply because
there is little (or perhaps none at all) empirical research in this area
(and it is perhaps worth wondering whether this is just an accident or
there is something inherent in presuppositions that hinders experimental
investigation). Hopefully, future investigations will fill this gap. 

With regards to the experimental scope of the volume, the papers employ
methodologies from language acquisition, off- and on-line adult processing,
neurophysiology and reasoning. This range of experimental paradigms is
definitely representative of the empirical fields. However, the chapters do
not exhaust the relevant experimental methodologies. Two more areas are
relevant to the ExPrag enterprise (1) investigations on impaired
populations, either adults (e.g. patients with brain lesions that can
potentially help localise brain areas that are involved in pragmatic
processing; see Bloom, & Obler, 1998; Kasher, Batori, Soroker, Graves, &
Zaidel, 1999 i.a.) or atypically developing children (e.g. Autistic
Spectrum Disorder, Specific Language Impairment; see Bishop, 2000; Happe
1993 i.a.) that can reveal the developmental stages of pragmatic abilities,
and (2) research in the area of sentence processing that investigates the
incremental interpretation of linguistic material. For example,
investigations in the latter area have shown that pragmatic principles and
information from linguistic and situational context can affect parsing from
the earliest possible stage advocating against a conception of pragmatics
as a secondary system (Altmann & Steedman, 1988; Tanenhaus,
Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995 i.a.) without them being the only
relevant factor. There are further studies in this literature on whether
people can make use of the Gricean maxims of Quantity when incrementally
assigning reference (Sedivy, Tanenhaus, Chambers, and Carlson, 1999) which
have initiated a debate on whether humans are fully 'Gricean' or not
(Engelhardt, Bailey, & Ferreira, 2006). These areas are directly relevant
to experimental pragmatics, and it would be beneficial to represent them in
future reviews of the field.

(C) Is experimental pragmatics more of a promise for future scientific
advances or does it already deliver some concrete and clear findings that
linguists and philosophers could take into account?  

Clearly the answer is 'both'. Different chapters of the book reflect
research that is at different stages. The chapters in the 'Pioneering
Approaches' section summarise the results of research that has been ongoing
of years and has to offer conclusive findings. To choose a few examples,
chapter 4 by Sam Glucksberg reviews studies on metaphor that argue against
the literal-interpretation-first hypothesis that postulates that metaphors
arise as implicatures out of the defectiveness of the literal
interpretation. On the contrary these studies indicate that the
contextually appropriate interpretation is selected automatically, without
any processing cost that would be entailed by inferences that arise out of
secondary processes. Similarly, Gibbs' studies on indirect speech acts
(chapter 3) clearly show that in appropriately constrained contexts
indirect speech acts are not interpreted via accessing and subsequently
rejecting the primary illocutionary force, but rather through a
short-circuited process. Furthermore, Clark and Bangerter (chapter 1)
demonstrate that establishing and maintaining references involves engaging
in joint attention and speaker/listener cooperation to an extent that
cannot be accounted for non-fully-pragmatic theories of reference. It is
hard to see how these findings are not directly and essentially relevant to
theoretical discussions of metaphors, speech acts and reference as well as
psycholinguistic investigations. These chapters present an established
paradigm for investigating these questions and offer conclusive results
that can be incorporated in current research programmes and of course
undergraduate and graduate courses.

Other contributions in the volume reflect promising ongoing research.
Chapters 12 to 14 in Part 3 on Scalar Implicatures (henceforth SIs), are
such a case. There is suggestive evidence that scalar terms are interpreted
without an SI in the early stages of language development. There is also
evidence from adult processing that generating an SI comes with a
processing cost rather than being an automatic and effortless process.
These investigations have initiated a growing number of studies. Studies in
acquisition (Guasti, Chierchia, Crain, Foppolo, Gualmini, & Meroni, 2005;
Foppolo, Guasti & Chierchia, submitted; Papafragou & Musolino, 2003;
Pouscoulous & Noveck, submitted) and in adult processing (Bott & Noveck,
2004; Breheny, Katsos & Williams in press; Katsos, Breheny & Williams 2005;
Noveck & Posada, 2003 i.a.) have lent further support to the empirical
findings reported in this volume to the extent that there is a growing
consensus on both the pattern of acquisition and the time-course of SIs.
The emphasis in now on the theoretical debate between contextual and
default theories of SIs, and how they can account for the data. The case of
Scalar Implicatures is exemplifying work in progress that can make
promising contributions to both theoretical and empirical disciplines. 

(D) Even if there are concrete experimental findings, do these data
constitute relevant evidence for linguistic-pragmatics, or could they be
dismissed as part of performance (rather than pragmatic competence per se)? 

Of course, the critical issue is whether philosophical accounts of
language, and linguistic research on pragmatic competence should be
concerned with experimental findings IN PRINCIPLE. It is possible to see
that a similar question has been raised in other areas of linguistics, and
especially syntax, where the divide between competence and performance has
lead a number of people to claim that psycholinguistic data are part of
performance, and therefore irrelevant to linguistic theories of competence
(for a critical discussion see Newmeyer, 2005). It would be outside the
scope of this review to discuss this issue. But clearly, it is a strong
conviction of every contributor to this volume that studies on pragmatic
performance are a source of information about competence per se.

This discussion brings us to the last issue I would like to raise: even if
experiments are indeed relevant for linguistic-pragmatics, how do we relate
the empirical findings to theoretical accounts? On the one hand, it is
linguists themselves that underscore the relevance of psycholinguistic
evidence to linguistic-pragmatics (e.g. for the case of SIs see Chierchia
2001/2004; Levinson, 2000; Wilson & Sperber 2003 i.a.). On the other hand,
what experiments can falsify or not is a psycholinguistic model. There is
always the issue of whether a certain psycholinguistic model is an
accurate/reasonable 'translation' of a given linguistic theory into
psycholinguistic terms. This issue is raised particularly in the
contributions of Sanford & Moxey (chapter 6) and Bezuidenhout & Morris
(chapter 12). In the end of the day, more than one linguistic-pragmatic
theories may be able to account for the psycholinguistic data. The issue
then becomes, which theory can account for the evidence straightforwardly,
by making less ad hoc assumptions. This is of course a matter open to
interpretation; at least the process of engaging into this discussion
should be beneficial in making explicit all the underlying assumptions.  

Overall, since its publication, this volume has been hailed for its
importance in the flourishing field of Experimental Pragmatics. There has
been a series of interrelated ExPrag conferences, (2001 in Lyon, 2003 in
Milan, 2005 in Cambridge, as well as a forthcoming workshop in Brussels
(June 2006)), and there have been ExPrag workshops in major conferences
(the 9th IPrA in Riva, Experimental Linguistics in Athens). The growing
interest in the discipline is reflected in the call for papers for special
issues on experimental pragmatics in the 'Journal of Semantics' and 'First
Language' as well as in the development of a dedicated website
(www.experimentalpragmatics.org). This book is consistently cited in these
activities and it is one of the major cornerstones that contribute to the
growth of the Experimental Pragmatics enterprise.
	 
REFERENCES:

Altmann, G. & Steedman, M. (1988). Interaction with context during human
sentence processing. Cognition, 38, 419-439.

Bloom, R. L., & Obler, L. K. (1998). Pragmatic breakdown in patients with
left and right brain damage: Clinical implications. In M. Paradis (Ed.),
Pragmatics in neurogenic communication disorders (pp. 11-20). Oxford:
Elsevier Science.

Bishop, D.V.M. (2000). Pragmatic language impairment: A correlate of SLI, a
distinct subgroup, or part of the autistic continuum? In D.V.M. Bishop &
L.B. Leonard (Eds.), Speech and language impairments in children: Causes,
characteristics, intervention and outcome (pp. 99-113). Hove, UK:
Psychology Press.

Bott, L. & Noveck, I .A. (2004). Some utterances are underinformative: The
onset and time course of scalar inferences. Journal of Memory and Language,
51, 437-457

Breheny, R., Katsos, N. & Williams, J. in (press) Are Generalised Scalar
Implicatures Generated by Default? An on-line investigation into the role
of context in generating pragmatic inferences. Cognition

Chierchia, G. (2001/2004). Scalar Implicatures, Polarity Phenomena, and the
Syntax/Pragmatics Interface. In A. Belletti Structures and Beyond. Oxford
University Press.

Engelhardt, P., Bailey, D, & Ferreira, F. (2006) Do speakers and listeners
observe the Gricean Maxim of Quantity? Journal of Memory and Language

Foppolo, F., Guasti, M.T. and Chierchia, G. (submitted) Scalar implicatures
in child language: failure, strategies and lexical factors

Grice, P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole and J.L. Morgan,
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ABOUT THE REVIEWER


Napoleon Katsos is a Ph.D. student at the Research Centre for English and
Applied Linguistics, Cambridge, working on the processing of scalar
implicatures by adults in English and Greek. His research employs off-line
questionnaires and on-line reading time measures to investigate the effect
of structural and contextual factors on the generation of logical and ad
hoc scalar implicatures. 




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