Alternatives and competition in language are pervasive at all levels of linguistic analysis.
More specifically, alternatives have been argued to play a prominent role in an ever-growing …

Probabilistic pragmatics aspires to explain certain regularities of language use and
interpretation as behavior of speakers and listeners who want to satisfy their conversational …

Pragmatics, situated in the domains of linguistics and computational linguistics, explores the
influence of context on language interpretation, extending beyond the literal meaning of …

We present evidence that preschool children oftentimes understand disjunctive sentences
as if they were conjunctive. The result holds for matrix disjunctions as well as disjunctions …

In many languages, the same particles that form quantifier words also serve as connectives,
additive and scalar particles, question markers, roots of existential verbs, and so on. Do …

Building on previous works which argued that scalar implicatures can be computed in
embedded positions, this paper proposes a constraint on exhaustification (an economy …

This dissertation investigates the peculiar behavior of negative polarity items in questions
and argues that a unified account of their distribution across declarative and interrogative …

In this thesis, I investigate a set of apparently disparate phenomena that relate, more or less
closely, to the interpretation of Determiner Phrases (DPs): the restrictiveness effects …

We investigate the interactions between scalar implicatures and presuppositions in
sentences containing both a scalar item and presupposition trigger. We first critically discuss …

When interpreting disjunctive sentences of the form 'A or B', young children have been
reported to differ from adults in two ways. First, children have been reported to interpret …