Experimental pragmatics has recently emerged as an independent and productive discipline of linguistic research. It focuses on meaning in context, and employs experimental techniques from linguistics and psycholinguistics. This approach complements traditional methods of pragmatic enquiry, both by providing objective quantitative data and by enabling us to study things that are not necessarily accessible to
introspection, such as the time-course of processing. In this course, we examine some of the major topics in experimental pragmatics, such as implicature, presupposition, and reference resolution. We will consider what the experimental approach can add to our understanding of these issues. In particular, we will see how different pragmatic theories give rise to empirically testable predictions, and how we can design and conduct experimental research to confirm or disconfirm these predictions. And we will see how this approach can be useful in distinguishing between different theories when they are all apparently descriptively adequate.