All the things you could have said: theories and experiments on implicit meanings

A core part of the study of our  knowledge of meaning has to do with the inferences we draw from sentences, with the assumption that understanding the meaning of a sentence involves understanding what you can conclude from it. One of the most important of such inferences are 'implicatures,' an example of which is the conclusion that not all of the students did well on the exam, from a sentence like (1). 

(1) Some of the students did well on the exam. 

In its traditional conception, going back to the seminal work of the philosopher Paul Grice, implicatures arise on the pragmatic side of meaning, on the basis of implicit reasoning over what the speaker said and what she could have said instead. More recently, implicatures have been argued to arise more on the semantics side. In both approaches, alternative sentences which were not uttered by the speaker but could have been, play a crucial in the derivation of implicatures. In this course, we will systematically review the debate about the different approaches to this crucial type of inference we draw from sentences, combining both theoretical and experimental literature.