All humans can interpret sentences of their native language quickly and
without effort. Working from the perspective of generative grammar, this
volume investigates three mental mechanisms that are widely assumed to
underlie this ability: compositional semantics, implicature computation and
presupposition computation. For all three mechanisms, formal models have
been advanced recently that are accurate for many cases. There is some
consensus in the field, however, that further progress requires stronger
interconnections between these results. This collection brings together
experts from semantics and pragmatics who push this agenda forward. From
this perspective, the contributors develop new insights into important
empirical phenomena; for example, individual level predicates, free choice
effects, presupposition accommodation, exhaustivity effects, specificity.
With contributions by many leading researchers in the field, this book will
be a useful source for both researchers and students interested in sentence
interpretation and language use.