Bart Geurts - Böcker

This volume explores the new interdisciplinary field of evolutionary pragmatics, which encompasses research on both the evolution of abilities needed for pragmatics and the role of pragmatics in the evolution of language. The biological evolution of linguistic capacities and the cultural evolution of natural languages were both driven by the communicative interactions of our ancestors; since these communicative interactions are the province of pragmatics, evolutionary pragmatics is the cornerstone of the study of the evolution of language.The chapters in this volume investigate a wide range of pragmatic topics from an evolutionary perspective, including reference, ambiguity, common ground, communicative intentions, and language conventions. The authors also examine a number of topics relating specifically to evolutionary pragmatics, ranging from baboon vocalizations and gestural communication in chimpanzees to formal models of the evolution of signalling systems and the co-evolution of pragmatics and grammar. The range of approaches adopted reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the field, with insights from linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and primatology.

In recent years, quantity implicatures - a type of pragmatic inference - have been widely debated in linguistics, philosophy, and psychology, and have been subject to an enormous variety of analyses, ranging from lexical, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic, to various hybrid accounts. In this first book-length discussion of the topic, Bart Geurts presents a theory of quantity implicatures that is resolutely pragmatic, arguing that the orthodox Gricean approach to conversational implicature is capable of accounting for all the standard cases of quantity implicature, and more. He shows how the theory deals with free-choice inferences as merely a garden variety of quantity implicatures, and gives an in-depth treatment of so-called 'embedded implicatures'. Moreover, as well as offering a comprehensive theory of quantity implicatures, he also takes into account experimental data and processing issues. Original and pioneering, and avoiding technical terminology, this insightful study will be invaluable to linguists, philosophers, and experimental psychologists alike.