Overview of Experimental Research on Embedded Implicatures

In recent years, with the interdisciplinary integration of cognitive science and linguistics, experimental pragmatics has emerged as a burgeoning interdisciplinary field. In the course of its development, embedded implicature has become a newly added research topic attracting considerable attention. Generally, embedded implicatures concern the conversational implicatures of complex sentences. Specifically, an embedded implicature is a seeming conversational implicature that is engendered locally at the sub-sentential level, typically occurring in a clause that is embedded under a logical operator such as a propositional attitude verb, a conditional and a comparative. The paper provides a critical overview of experimental research on embedded implicatures. It starts with the experimental background, figuring out that embedded implicature is a cutting-edge topic of experimental pragmatics in the narrow sense. It then attempts to explore the theoretical grounds and experimental methods, ranging from three approaches to ten paradigms. Next, we make an analysis of the experimental contents, covering experiments on three approaches, developmental pragmatics, scale diversity and large language model prediction. Finally, we outline the future development of experimental research on embedded implicatures from four key dimensions: foregrounding, refinement, systematization, and integration.