"Scalar Implicatures: Formal and Experimental Exploration"

This workshop focuses on recent developments in the theory of scalar implicatures with the intention to raise new issues suitable for formal and experimental exploration. The general discussion in the recent linguistic and philosophical literature has debated on the very nature of scalar implicatures, i.e. on whether scalar implicatures are computed as part of a conversational strategy to maximize informativity or rather as entailments from the semantic content of scalar sentences. Specific research questions have included the status of free choice inferences, the interaction between scalar implicatures and other phenomena, e.g. presuppositions, the relationship between scalar implicatures computation and the exhaustive interpretation of questions, and the interaction between the scalar implicatures mechanism and contextual knowledge. A special session of the workshop will be devoted to the discussion of the supposed contextual blindness of scalar implicatures, with special emphasis on recent developments in complex environments, e.g. conjunctions, and on different proposals concerning the definition of the ordering relation among alternatives.