Abstract
Since Grice's groundbreaking work of the 1960s and 1970s it is widely accepted that a large part of the information communicated by means of linguistic utterances is not coded, but rather inferred on the basis of general pragmatic principles. Quantity implicatures (or Q-implicatures for short) are an important class of such pragmatic inferences, and have probably received more attention than any other. However, most of the literature is focused on one particular sub-class of Q-implicatures, so-called "scalar implicatures", and analyses scalar implicatures in a way that doesn't readily generalise to the entire class of Q-implicatures. The main goal of the proposed project is to develop a general and unified theory of Q-implicatures, based on previous work by the first applicant as well as other researchers. Although the project's central objective is theoretical, it has a significant empirical component, as well, in that it will conduct a range of quantitative studies on Q-implicatures that will provide us with a broader and more solid data base than is currently available.