This is another Lair

A:

Do you own a Cadillac?

B:

I wouldnt own any American car.

Interpreted literally, Speaker B is refusing to answer Speaker As yes/no question. But Speaker A will probably understand the response more naturally, supplying a series of plausible inferences that would explain how her query might have prompted Bs retort. Speaker As interpretation might go something like this: “Speaker B knows that I know that a Cadillac is an American car. He’s therefore telling me that he does not own a Cadillac in a way that both responds to my question with a no and also tells me something else: that he dislikes all American cars.”

Such leaps from a speaker’s utterance to a listener’s interpretation are commonplace.

Listeners do not usually wait for everything to be said explicitly. On the contrary, they often supply a chain of inferred causes and effects that were not actually contained in what the speaker said, but that nonetheless capture what was intended (H. H. Clark, 1992).