For more than 20 years, studies in experimental pragmatics have provided invaluable
insights into the cognitive processes involved in deriving scalar implicatures and achieving …

The ability to convey meaning is a fundamental property of human language. Three main
aspects, in particular, have drawn the attention of linguists: semantic meaning, that is, the …

In the face of unfamiliar language or objects, description is one cue people can use to learn
about both. Beyond narrowing potential referents to those that match a descriptor (eg,“tall”) …

People derive contrastive inferences when interpreting adjectives (eg, inferring that 'the
short pencil'is being contrasted with a longer one). However, classic eye-tracking studies …

We show that the interpretation of sentences like John is not very Adj depends on whether
Adj is vague. We argue that this follows from a constraint on the interaction between …

Contrastive inferences, whereby a listener pragmatically infers a speaker's referential
intention of a partial referring expression like the yellow by reasoning about other objects in …

The word 'true'shows some evidence of gradability. For instance, there are cases where truth-
bearers are described as 'slightly true','completely true'or 'very true'. Expressions that accept …

When people hear words for objects with prototypical colors (eg,'banana'), they look at
objects of the same color (eg, lemon), suggesting a link in comprehension between objects …

While for relative gradable adjectives the value on the underlying measurement scale that
serves as a standard of comparison is contextually determined, for absolute gradable …

Gradable adjectives (GAs) provide an ideal domain for evaluating theories of the interface
betwen semantic interpretation and context: relative and absolute GAs are both context …