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In:Patterns of Context: Modelling cultural and contextual influence in utterance interpretation
Edited by Elke Diedrichsen and Frank Liedtke
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 356] 2026
► pp. 150–169

Inferences from, and about, context in a joint inference model of utterance interpretation

 | University of Edinburgh
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
A number of contextual variables have been argued to influence whether a quantity implicature is available, including the speaker’s knowledge state, the relevance of the stronger alternative, and whether the speaker is wholly cooperative. In real-life contexts, however, the hearer may not know the status of these variables. Most strikingly, it may be unclear whether the speaker is attempting to present information selectively in order to advance an argumentative agenda. In this chapter, I use these ideas to motivate a model of conversational implicature in terms of joint inference, with the hearer aiming to establish a probabilistic view not only about the world state but also about the other relevant contextual features.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Calculability and conversational implicature
  • 2.Disjunctive conversational implicatures?
  • 3.Where disjunctions of situations are not implicated
  • 4.Scalar implicature and its failure
  • 5.Inferences about the preconditions for scalar implicature
  • 6.Factorising the context for implicature
  • 7.Conclusions and outlook
  • Notes
  • References
References (37)
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