This research focuses on what determines speakers' choice of positive and negative probability phrases (e.g., “a chance” vs. “not certain”) in a legal context. We argue that choice of phrase to describe an event's probability of occurrence can be …
Accounts of the scalar inference from ‘some X-ed’ to ‘not all X-ed’ are central to the debate between contemporary theories of conversational pragmatics. An important contribution to this debate is to identify contexts that decrease the endorsement …
Offender profilers use verbal and numerical probability expressions to convey uncertainty surrounding claims made about offender's characteristics. No previous research has examined how these expressions might affect the recipient's interpretation of …
The utterance of a negative statement invites the pragmatic inference that some reason exists for the proposition it negates to be true; this pragmatic inference paves the way for the logically unexpected Modus Shmollens inference: “If p then q; …
When a statement about the occurrence of a medical condition is qualified by an expression of probability, such as the word possible, listeners interpret the probability of the condition as being higher the more severe the condition. This severity …
We argue that logical expressions in human language enable speakers to perform particular acts as well as stating propositions which may be true or false. We present a conversational action planning model of co-ordinated reasoning, which we use to …