3. Skating along the syntactic verge: Experimental pragmatics and understood elements of content

This chapter discusses elements of communicative content that are not expressed by overt elements of a sentence. In the 1970s and 1980s, mostly inspired by the work of Grice, forms of ‘unexpressed elements of content’ not contemplated by linguistic theory of the time began to surface under a variety of labels, collectively called ‘impliciture’ here. It is argued in this chapter that recent experimental work suggests that certain forms of impliciture are tied to language via “standardization” which provides a pragmatic scenario that does not require access to potentially unbounded domains of general background information.