The ability to communicate through spoken and written language is one of the defining characteristics of the human race, yet it remains a deeply mysterious proc

Explains the phenomena, theoretical debates, experiments and historical development of experimental pragmatics, which investigates how utterances communicate a

This handbook is the first to explore the growing field of experimental semantics and pragmatics. In the past 20 years, experimental data has become a major sou

When people speak, their words never fully encode what they mean, and the context is always compatible with a variety of interpretations. How can comprehension