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Chapter 10 summarizes the book’s analyses and proposal regarding (i) similarities and differences between semantic scalar modifiers and pragmatic scalar modifiers, (ii) variations in pragmatic scalar modifiers, (iii) interpretations of embedded pragmatic scalar modifiers, and (iv) the historical development of pragmatic scalar modifiers, and considers theoretical implications. The dual-use phenomenon of scalar modifiers and the interpretations of pragmatic scalar modifiers suggest that although there is a difference between at-issue and not-at-issue meanings, they have a flexible relationship. The chapter argues that both types of meanings must be captured in a unified or flexible fashion. This multidimensional approach is compared to other alternative approaches: the relevance-theoretic approach and Bach’s approach, which does not assume the notion of a CI. Finally, possible future directions for studies of pragmatic scalar modifiers and not-at-issue content are briefly considered.

Chapter 2 provides the landscape of scalar meanings and highlights the target phenomenon of this book—the phenomenon of the dual use of scalar modifiers. More specifically, four kinds of scalar meanings are introduced: at-issue scalar meaning, conversational scalar meaning, presuppositional scalar meaning, and conventional implicature (CI) scalar meaning. There follows an informal examination of the dual-use phenomenon of scalar modifiers where a scalar modifier can express an at-issue scalar meaning and a CI scalar meaning. The similarities and differences between a CI and a presupposition are also considered. It is claimed that a CI and a presupposition belong to a different class of meaning and should theoretically be treated differently.

This chapter presents a monadic analysis of conventional implicatures. These expressions are compositionally challenging and also seem to challenge the traditional semantics/pragmatics divide by straddling it. This chapter first introduces two main sorts of conventional implicature, appositives and expressives. It reviews one standard approach to capturing the dual nature of conventional implicatures, multidimensional semantic representations. It then reviews some challenges and argues that they do not entail abandoning multidimensionality. The chapter introduces a new multidimensional analysis using monads. Two examples are analysed in detail. The first is an example of a conventional implicature arising from an appositive. The second is an example of a conventional implicature arising from an expressive predicate, which is a more controversial case. The chapter shows that the enriched meaning analysis naturally extends to this case without imperilling the intuition behind multidimensionality. The chapter ends with some exercises to aid understanding.