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 Minimalist Program postulates the equation "Interfaces + Recursion = Language" - a radical reduction of the language to the core mechanism and the interfaces. With contributions by Noam Chomsky and other experts, this volume evaluates the minimalists' proposal against evidence from syntax and semantics by asking questions like the following: What kind of recursive structures can the core generator form? How can properties of language be reduced to interface properties? What LF-interface conditions are predicted by semantic research? Key features Contains the latest update on Chomsky's...

This book brings together chapters on the semantics and pragmatics of measurement, scales, and numerical expressions. The chapters highlight recent developments in measurement theory, the meaning of numerical expressions and the relation between measurement scales and entailment scales. The authors provide explorations in formal and experimental semantics and pragmatics, as well as at the interfaces of this field with others including philosophy of language and sociolinguistics. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in these areas, as well as psychology, psycholinguistics and...