In the last chapter we saw that presuppositions are both mandatorily imported into fictional records and mandatorily generated as fictional truths along with their triggers. Presuppositional information is backgrounded in the sense that it is assumed to be available as part of a fictional record. This chapter examines a key source of foreground information in fictional records: conversational implicatures. I argue that conversational implicatures are inferred from what authors say on the basis of assuming that the author had Gricean intentions about their audience and is obeying principles of cooperation regarding the story. Further, we will see that conversational implicatures are mandatorily imported but not mandatorily generated.

We have seen that audiences import conversational implicatures from what authors and narrators explicitly say, just as we fluently recognize that fictional characters conversationally implicate things to each other. I begin this chapter by showing that this process relies on background information in the form of supporting assumptions. I then go on to discuss a final category of background information that I call default inferences. We will see that while supporting assumptions are mandatorily imported but not mandatorily generated, default inferences are optional in both senses.

This chapter starts by summarizing the predictions made by various theories of implicature that have consequences for language processing. It then presents empirical evidence bearing on a number of questions related to the processing of implicatures, namely: their processing cost, the difference between particularized and generalized implicatures, the role of mental state attribution for the derivation of implicatures, the role of politeness for the derivation of implicatures.

This chapter starts by summarizing the predictions made by various theories of implicature that have consequences for language processing. It then presents empirical evidence bearing on a number of questions related to the processing of implicatures, namely: their processing cost, the difference between particularized and generalized implicatures, the role of mental state attribution for the derivation of implicatures, the role of politeness for the derivation of implicatures.