This chapter covers the notions of inference and implicature from a broad pragmatic and sociopragmatic perspective. Starting from the fact that inference has wide applicability also in psychology and logic, while implicature is limited only to pragmatics, it opens by drawing three distinctions: (1) between inference in a broad and in a narrow sense, (2) between inference and implicature and (3) between inference and implicature as both product and process. It then discusses processes of implicature generation within Gricean and post-Gricean accounts. While the general position taken is that 'speakers implicate, hearers infer', this position is also problematized by drawing on sociopragmatics research that challenges the notion of the speaker’s intention and explores how (else) meaning can be generated.

Sociopragmatics encompasses the study of social dimensions of language use. This chapter discusses directions in the rapidly growing field of sociopragmatics. It begins by first introducing the rationale for producing the first handbook of sociopragmatics, before briefly discussing the different, albeit complementary, ways in which the scope of sociopragmatics has been framed in the field. In the course of this discussion we draw particular attention to three key anchors of sociopragmatic research: social, interactional and normative dimensions of language use. We then offer an overview of the contents of the handbook, explaining how we have brought together a range of different research areas, topics and approaches under the umbrella of sociopragmatics. We conclude with thoughts on the place of sociopragmatics with respect to the broader field of pragmatics.

Armostis and Terkourafi’s chapter focuses on aspects of politeness underrepresented in politeness research: prosody and the (competing) functions of borrowed and inherited linguistic items expressing politeness. Their first experiment looks at different phonological variants of thank you and the intonation patterns with which it is used, and establishes the contexts in which it is likely to be interpreted as a sincere form of thanking by speakers of Cypriot Greek. It shows that the decisive phonetic dimension is intonation; non-rising intonation is interpreted as sincere, especially in women’s speech. In the second experiment, participants listened to stimuli varying in choice of thanking item, intonation and address terms, and evaluated them on 14 dimensions expressing positive and negative attitudes. The results show that borrowed thank you is more likely to be evaluated as off-putting, curt, and arrogant than inherited efxariˈsto when used in high-imposition contexts, though the addition of address forms has a uniformly positive effect on both forms. The authors use these results to tease apart the effects of intonation and lexis on the evaluation of an utterance as im/polite.