Implicature and discourse structure: An introduction

This special issue brings together two major approaches to implicated, non-literal meaning of an utterance: the Gricean theory of conversational implicature and theories of discourse macro-structure. The main questions addressed by the authors of contributed papers are whether and how implicatures of individual utterances depend on discourse context and vice versa. The purpose of this introduction is to provide the reader with necessary background on Gricean implicature, discourse structure, and the interaction between them.