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On the naive account of scalar modifiers like more than and at least, At least three girls snored is synonymous with More than two girls snored, and both sentences mean that the number of snoring girls exceeded two (the same, mutatis mutandis, for sentences with at most and less/fewer than). We show that this is false and propose an alternative theory, according to which superlative modifiers (at least/most) are quite different from comparative ones (more/less/fewer than). Whereas the naive theory is basically right about comparative modifiers, it is wrong about superlative modifiers, which we claim have a MODAL meaning: an utterance of At least three girls snored conveys two things: first, that it is CERTAIN that there was a group of three snoring girls, and second, that more than four girls MAY have snored. We argue that this analysis explains various facts that are problematic for the naive view, which have to do with specificity, distributional differences between superlative and comparative modifiers, differential patterns of inference licensed by these expressions, and the way they interact with various operators, like modals and negation.* 2.1. PUZZLE #1: SPECIFICITY. If the naive view on comparative and superlative quantifiers were correct, 3a and 3b should be equivalent. (3) a. I will invite at most two people, namely Jack and Jill. b. ?I will invite fewer than three people, namely Jack and Jill. Yet, there are clear differences. First, for most speakers 3b is markedly less felicitous than 3a is. Second, while 3a does not entail that anyone will be invited, it follows from 3b that the number of people to be invited equals two (that is to say, the invitees will be Jack and Jill). Similarly, while 4a is perfectly acceptable, and allows for the possibility that more than two people will be invited, 4b is less felicitous and rules out that possibility (cf. Kadmon 1992, Corblin 2007). (4) a. I will invite at least two people, namely Jack and Jill. b. ?I will invite more than one person, namely Jack and Jill. These contrasts already suggest rather strongly that superlative and comparative quantifiers are not interdefinable. But how do they arise? Our suggestion is that the namely riders in the (a) and (b) sentences are licensed in entirely different ways (assuming that the latter sentences are acceptable at all). The superlative quantifiers in the (a) sentences contain an existential expression that admits of a specific construal, viz. 'two people'. Thus interpreted, the phrase conveys that there is a particular pair of persons the speaker has in mind, and the namely rider identifies this pair as Jack and Jill. If this analysis is correct as far as it goes, it does not extend to the (b) sentences, if only because the phrases three people and one person are of the wrong cardinality. Furthermore, it is clear that an indefinite embedded in a comparative quantifier never admits of a specific construal. (5) *I will invite more/fewer than two people, namely Jack and Jill. If the namely riders in 3b and 4b are not li...

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.

Although people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often have severe problems with pragmatic aspects of language, little is known about their pragmatic reasoning. We carried out a behavioral study on highfunctioning adults with autistic disorder (n = 11) and Asperger syndrome (n = 17) and matched controls (n = 28) to investigate whether they are capable of deriving scalar implicatures, which are generally considered to be pragmatic inferences. Participants were presented with underinformative sentences like ''Some sparrows are birds''. This sentence is logically true, but pragmatically inappropriate if the scalar implicature ''Not all sparrows are birds'' is derived. The present findings indicate that the combined ASD group was just as likely as controls to derive scalar implicatures, yet there was a difference between participants with autistic disorder and Asperger syndrome, suggesting a potential differentiation between these disorders in pragmatic reasoning. Moreover, our results suggest that verbal intelligence is a constraint for task performance in autistic disorder but not in Asperger syndrome.

The experimental record of the last three decades shows that children under 4 years old fail all sorts of variations on the standard false-belief task, whereas more recent studies have revealed that infants are able to pass nonverbal versions of the task. We argue that these paradoxical results are an artifact of the type of false-belief tasks that have been used to test infants and children: Nonverbal designs allow infants to keep track of a protagonist’s perspective over a course of events, whereas verbal designs tend to disrupt the perspective-tracking process in various ways, which makes it too hard for younger children to demonstrate their capacity for perspective tracking. We report three experiments that confirm this hypothesis by showing that 3-year-olds can pass a suitably streamlined version of the verbal false-belief task. We conclude that young children can pass the verbal false-belief task provided that they are allowed to keep track of the protagonist’s perspective without too much disruption.