In a manner of speaking: progress and challenges in the study of the elusive manner implicature

We review theoretical accounts of manner implicature, which propose that the form of an utterance can contribute to the inferred meaning, and critically survey recent experimental studies which lend tentative empirical psycholinguistic support for hearers’ derivation of certain instances of manner implicatures. We suggest, however, that there remain some fundamental questions for accounts of manner implicature, concerning the role of markedness and semantic equivalence in language use, which leave instances of manner implicatures hard to identify intuitively. Established experimental pragmatic paradigms are also challenged by testing manner. We set out criteria and goals for future empirical work on manner implicatures, as well as opposing hypotheses to test on their acquisition. We call for further empirical and developmental work to elucidate the characteristics of manner implicatures and to model the sources of information in the pragmatic context which contribute to hearers’ derivation of manner implicatures. We suggest that learning from research on referential pacts and variationist sociolinguistics raises important questions for theories of manner, and that collaboration could develop our understanding of how form and meaning interact in communication more generally.