All humans can interpret sentences of their native language quickly and without effort. Working from the perspective of generative grammar, the contributors to this volume investigate three mental mechanisms, widely assumed to underlie this ability: compositional semantics, implicature computation and presupposition computation.

The main argument of this book is that the notion of truth plays no role in speaker-hearers' interpretation of linguistic utterances and that it is not needed for theoretical accounts of linguistic meaning either. The theoretical argument is developed in the first part, while the second part supports it with cognitive relevance-theoretic, rather than truth-based, analyses of the 'concessive' expressions but, although and even if .

This book breaks new ground towards an understanding of the mental processes involved in presupposition, the comprehension of information taken for granted.

This volume brings together twelve papers by linguists and philosophers contributing novel empirical and formal considerations to theorizing about vagueness. Three main issues are addressed: gradable expressions and comparison, the semantics of degree adverbs and intensifiers (such as 'clearly'), and ways of evading the sorites paradox.

In considering the ways in which current theories of language in use and communicative processes are applied to the analysis, interpretation and definition of literary texts, this book sets an agenda for the future of pragmatic literary stylistics and provides a foundation for future research and debate.

This book contains an original analysis of the existential there-sentence from a philosophical-linguistic perspective. At its core is the claim that there-sentences' form is distinct from that of ordinary subject-predicate sentences, and that this fundamental difference explains the construction's unusual grammatical and discourse properties.

Assertion is a term frequently used in linguistics and philosophy but rarely defined. This in-depth study surveys and synthesizes a range of philosophical, linguistic and psychological literature on the topic, and then presents a detailed account of the cognitive processes involved in the interpretation of assertions.

How should we analyse the meaning of proper names, indexicals, demonstratives and definite descriptions? What relation do such expressions stand to the objects they designate or to mental representations of those objects? George Powell casts new light on these and other questions by approaching them from within a cognitive framework.

The result is an advanced debate featuring broad empirical coverage of the issues, as well as an informed discussion of the connections between a Compositional Semantics and a Pragmatic Theory of Implicit Communication, in light of the empirical data coming from Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics.

This book presents a novel experimental approach to investigating the mental representation of linguistic alternatives. Combining theoretical and psycholinguistic questions concerning the nature of alternative sets, it sheds new light on the theory of focus and the cognitive mechanisms underlying the processing of alternatives. In a series of language comprehension experiments, the author shows that intonational focus and focus particles such as 'only' shape the representation of alternatives in a listener's mind in a fundamental way. This book is relevant to researchers interested in...