We compare two aspects of meaning, namely the presupposition of stop in the scope of negation (John didn't stop going to the movies on Wednesday., → John used to go to the movies before Wednesday.) and scalar implicatures associated with strong scalar items under negation (John didn't always go to the movie last week. → John sometimes went to the movies last week.) ('Indirect Scalar Implicatures' (ISIs) Chierchia, 2004). Our results replicate the finding by Chemla and Bott (2013) that global presupposition interpretations are faster with a different methodology that avoids a potential confound of response bias. More surprisingly, ISIs are found to pattern with presuppositions in that responses reflecting an interpretation without an inference (corresponding to a 'literal' interpretation) are slower than ones based on the relevant inference, contrary to what has been found for direct scalar implicatures. These results are puzzling from the traditional perspective that ISIs are generated in the same way as direct implicatures. We explore two possible interpretations: first, strong scalar terms could receive a presuppositional analysis as well and presuppose that their domain is non-empty. Alternatively, we could group stop and ISIs together from another angle and see them as obligatory scalar implicatures, in contrast to the non-obligatory direct ones.

This paper presents experimental results showing that 4-and 5-year-old children are capable of drawing free choice inferences from disjunctive statements and from statements containing free choice indefinites, despite not being able to compute inferences of exclusivity for disjunctive statements, or other scalar implicatures. The findings appear to challenge accounts that attempt to unify the two kinds of inferences (

When interpreting disjunctive sentences of the form 'A or B,' young children have been reported to differ from adults in two ways. First, children have been reported to interpret disjunction inclusively rather than exclusively, accepting 'A or B' in contexts in which both A and B are true (Gualmini, Crain, Meroni, Chierchia & Guasti 2001; Chierchia, Crain, Guasti & Thornton 2001). Second, some children have been reported to interpret disjunction conjunctively, rejecting 'A or B' in contexts in which only one of the disjuncts is true (

In this paper, I give an analysis of neg-raising inferences as scalar implicatures. The main motivation for this account as opposed to a presupposition-based approach (Bartsch 1973and Gajewski 2005 comes from the differences between presuppositions and neg-raising inferences, noticed by Gajewski (2005Gajewski ( , 2007 and Homer (2012). In response to this issue, Gajewski (2007) argues that neg-raising predicates are soft presuppositional triggers and adopts the account of how their presuppositions arise by Abusch (2002Abusch ( , 2010. However, I argue that there is a difference between soft triggers and neg-raising predicates in their behavior in embeddings; a difference that is straightforwardly accounted for in the present approach. Furthermore, by adopting Abusch's (2010) account of soft triggers, Gajewski (2007) inherits the assumptions of a pragmatic principle of disjunctive closure and of a non-standard interaction between semantics and pragmatics -assumptions that are not needed by the present proposal, which is just based on a regular theory of scalar implicatures. I also show that the arguments that Gajewski (2007) presents in favor of the presuppositional account can be explained also by the scalar implicatures-based approach proposed here. Finally, while the main point of the paper is a comparison with the presuppositional account, I sketch a preliminary comparison with the revived syntactic approach by Collins & Postal (2012).

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>This paper provides novel experimental evidence for a scalar implicature approach to the plurality inferences that are associated with English plural morphology (</span><span>Emily fed giraffes </span><span>-&gt; </span><span>Emily fed more than one giraffe</span><span>). Using a Truth Value Judgment Task, we show that both adults and 4–5-year-old children compute more plurality inferences in upward-entailing than downward-entailing environments, but children compute fewer plurality inferences overall than adults do. These findings are consistent with previous research demonstrating children’s relative insensitivity to scalar implicatures. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of plurality inferences, and for the acquisition of scalar inferences more generally. </span></p></div></div></div>