Geurt's "Implicature"

by JLS
for the GC

In recent years, quantity implicatures - a type of pragmatic inference first introduced by Grice in 1952 (as cited by Strawson, Introduction to logical theory -- but cfr. Grice 1961, Causal theory of perception - have been widely debated in analytic philosophy ("Oxford variety") and ancillary disciplines such as linguistics and psychology, and have been subject to an enormous variety of analyses, ranging from purely philosophical and conceptual ones of the sort that interest, as with Grice, but also, lexical, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic, to various hybrid accounts.

In this first book-length discussion of the topic, as it pertains to one type of implicatum as per the Harvard lectures by Grice -- where he jokes on Kant and refers to Quantitaet -- Geurts presents a theory of "Quantitaet" implicatures that is resolutely pragmatic, arguing that the orthodox Gricean 1967 approach to conversational implicature is capable of accounting for all the standard cases of quantity implicature, and more.

Geurts shows how the theory deals with free-choice inferences as merely a garden variety of Quantitaet implicatures, and gives an in-depth treatment of so-called 'embedded implicatures'.

Moreover, as well as offering a comprehensive theory of Quantitaet implicatures, Geurts also takes into account experimental data and processing issues.

Original and pioneering, and avoiding technical terminology, this insightful study will be invaluable to Griceians, philosophers, linguists, and experimental psychologists alike.


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A pioneering study of quantity implicatures, a type of pragmatic inference which has been widely debated in linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. It argues that the Gricean approach to conversational implicature can account for all the standard cases of quantity implicature, and also takes into account experimental data and processing issues.