According to Grice, understanding an utterance requires access to, or making hypotheses about, the speaker’s intention and thus involves going beyond the meanings of the words in the sentence.
While scalar implicatures continue to dominate discussion, other prominent topics that fall under the rubric of experimental pragmatics include irony, metaphor, metonymy, reference, and word-learning.
In addition to the fields Noveck & Sperber above mentioned, semantics, neuroscience and philosophy have also contributed to Experimental Pragmatics, but also been influenced by it.
"[10] The first workshop with the title Experimental Pragmatics took place in Luton, UK in 1998 and was organized by Billy Clark and Steve Nicolle under the auspices of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB).
The field began to catch on after a workshop in 2001 (organized by Ira Noveck and Dan Sperber in Lyon, France under the auspices of the European Science Foundation).
The workshop organizers invited many of the pragmatists and psychologists who consistently relied on, or called for, experimental findings to support or test their pragmatic accounts.
Participants in the workshop included Anne Bezuidenhout, Robyn Carston, Gennaro Chierchia, Billy Clark, Herb Clark, Ray Gibbs, Vittorio Girotto, Sam Glucksberg, Rachel Giora, Ira Noveck, Guy Politzer, Anne Reboul, Francois Recanati, Tony Sanford, Dan Sperber, Johan van der Auwera, Jean-Baptiste van der Henst, and Deirdre Wilson.