New Perspectives on Utterance Interpretation and Implicit Contents

For some years now, meanings that are communicated implicitly have been the target of intense theoretical debate and considerable empirical examination. However, it is mainly during the last decade that scholars started covering a range of topics from a variety of perspectives, weaving together fields such as logics, semantics, pragmatics, and psychology. For example, researchers increasingly challenged notions widely referred to by linguists such as explicit/implicit meaning, direct/indirect speech acts in the light of psychological plausibility. Some of them even questioned the kind of methodology used in traditional experimental psycholinguistics. The papers gathered in this volume specifically address the most important issues related to implicit contents and utterance interpretation: inferential mechanisms, figurative language, indirect speech acts, sarcastic expressions, and untruthful implicatures. The volume sheds new light on linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to utterance interpretation.