No abstract

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>I show that the infelicity of disjunctions in which one disjunct entails the other (“Hurford disjunctions”), as well as the felicity of a subclass of Hurford disjunctions (e.g., </span><span>some or all</span><span>), can be derived from a general principle of Brevity under the independently motivated assumption that uncertainty implicatures are generated in the grammar. </span></p></div></div></div>

I show how a formalization of Grice's Brevity intuition, which I call Efficiency (Meyer 2013(Meyer , 2014, correctly distinguishes between acceptable and unacceptable disjunctions that all seem to be redundant at first (e.g., Gajewski & Sharvit 2012;Mayr & Romoli 2013). The upshot is that the presence of embedded implicatures is one way of making a structure efficient in the formal sense developed here. I show that a particular prediction of Efficiency-the existence of embedded implicatures resulting in overall weakening of meaning-is not incorrect, and sheds new light on the role of rise-fall-rise intonation in these cases (Fox & Spector 2013;Büring 1997).

No abstract

Across a wide variety of semantically ambiguous sentences, implicature has been proposed as a single mechanism which can derive one reading from another in a systematic way. While a single formal mechanism for computing implicatures across disparate cases has an appealing parsimony, differences in behavioral and processing signatures between cases have created a debate about whether the same computation really is so widely shared. Building on previous work by Bott & Chemla (2016), three experiments use structural priming to test for shared computations across three purported cases of implicature: the quantifier some, number words, and Free Choice disjunctions. While we find evidence of a shared computation between the enriched readings of some and number words, we find no evidence that Free Choice readings involve any shared computation with either some or number. Along with evidence of a shared mechanism between some and number implicatures, we also find substantial differences between these two cases. We propose a way to reconcile these findings, as well as seemingly contradictory prior evidence, by understanding implicature as a sequence of separable sub-computations. This implies a spectrum of possibilities for which sub-computations might be shared or distinct between cases, instead of a a single implicature mechanism that can only be either present or absent.