Within the Gricean framework only what is conversationally implicated is cancellable, whereas what is conventionally implicated and what is said cannot be cancelled without giving rise to contradiction. In the relevance-theoretic framework, however, the question is whether explicatures, which replace the Gricean notion of what is said, are cancellable. In recent years, various objections to the cancellability of explicatures have been raised. The aim of the present paper is to demonstrate that these objections are due to a misinterpretation of the Gricean cancellability test. In particular, they disregard the fact that this test is merely one of several diagnostic tools that are used by Grice to distinguish between conventional and conversational implicatures. Once we have recognized the essence of the cancellability test, the objections to the cancellability of explicatures turn out to be unwarranted.

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The idea of language as a network is not new. There are several network models that describe language by relying on a descriptive apparatus which contains nodes, links and many other components (see, for instance, Hudson 2007; Lamb 1998). However, all these models make use of elements that are not justified by our current knowledge about the neurophysiology of the brain. In contrast, the network model presented by Rolf Kreyer attempts to mirror the knowledge we actually have about the brain. This comes along with a significant reduction of the descriptive apparatus which merely encompasses nodes representing elements of linguistic description and the connections between them. Kreyer's overall aim is to explain: how a system that is based on neurophysiological 'ingredients' can create structures that represent units and structures of language; at the same time, the study wants to show how these structures, when in operation, lead to activation patterns that represent the outcome of processes of language production and comprehension as described over the last few decades. (p. 6f.)