'Given the extent to which Implicatures manages not only to provide a concise overview of the topic, but also to introduce novel perspectives in relation to it, it is bound to become an indispensable resource for both newcomers and established researchers in these fields. I am certain that several of its main arguments … have a real potential to push our understanding of the issues that surround this notoriously elusive, but at the same time all too interesting, category of linguistic meaning even further.' Stavros Assimakopoulos, Language
Part I. Theoretical Foundations: 1. Ordinary language philosophy and the birth of pragmatics; 2. Linguistic theory and pragmatics; 3. Relevance theory and the broadening of pragmatics to explicit meaning; Part II. Types of Implicatures: 4. Particularized Conversational Implicatures: why there are conversational implicatures; 5. Conventional implicature and presupposition: formal semantics and pragmatics; 6. Generalized conversational implicatures: Gricean, neo-Gricean and post-Gricean pragmatics; Part III. Empirical Evidence: 7. Implicatures and language processing; 8. The acquisition of implicatures in the course of first language development; 9. Implicatures and second language acquisition; Conclusion.