A pragmatic constraint on ambiguity detection

Meyer, Marie-Christine; Sauerland, Uli

doi:10.1007/s11049-008-9060-2

Cited by 33 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…They would thus behave as if only the weakest reading of the sentence existed. Similar principles have been discussed by semanticists working on scope ambiguities (see Abusch 1993, Reinhart 1997, Meyer and Sauerland 2009 Now, recall that in the case of (2), the local reading asymmetrically entails the global reading, which itself asymmetrically entails the literal reading. This as such could explain why the local reading is hard to detect, even if it exists (see Sauerland 2010 for a similar 4 In theories of type T3, the derivation of the local reading requires that the alternatives relative to which the pragmatically strengthened reading of the sentence is computed be those induced by questions of this form.…”

Section: 'Preference For Truth'supporting

confidence: 52%

Experimental Evidence for Embedded Scalar Implicatures

Chemla

Spector

2011

Journal of Semantics

120

123

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Scalar implicatures are traditionally viewed as pragmatic inferences which result from a reasoning about speakers' communicative intentions . This view has been challenged in recent years by theories which propose that scalar implicatures are a grammatical phenomenon. Such theories claim that scalar implicatures can be computed in embedded positions and enter into the recursive computation of meaning-something that is not expected under the traditional, pragmatic view. Recently, Geurts and Pouscoulous (2009) presented an experimental study in which embedded scalar implicatures were not detected. Using a novel version of the truth value judgment tasks, we provide evidence that subjects sometimes compute embedded scalar implicatures.

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Section: 'Preference For Truth'supporting

confidence: 52%

Experimental Evidence for Embedded Scalar Implicatures

Chemla

Spector

2011

Journal of Semantics

120

123

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“…Sauerland (2010) suggests another way in which something similar to the Principle of Charity might serve to reconcile conventionalism with the facts. He appeals to a principle proposed by Meyer & Sauerland (2009), which goes as follows:…”

Section: :14mentioning

confidence: 99%

Embedded scalars

Geurts

Tiel

2013

S&P

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For over a decade, the interpretation of scalar expressions under embedding has been a much debated issue, with proposed accounts ranging from strictly pragmatic, on one end of the spectrum, to lexico-syntactic, on the other. There has been some confusion as to what exactly the controversy is about, and we argue that what is at stake is the division of labour between pragmatic and truth-conditional mechanisms. All parties to the debate agree that upper-bounded construals of scalar expressions are variously caused by conversational implicatures and truth-conditional narrowing, but whereas Griceans argue that the former mechanism is the main cause, conventionalists point to the latter, assuming as a matter of course that the source of truth-conditional narrowing lies in linguistic convention; on this view, narrowing is either a lexical or a syntactic phenomenon. Since researchers' introspective judgments tend to agree with the theories they advocate, a number of experimental studies have recently tried to shed light on this issue. In this paper, we review the experimental record, and argue that the extant data favour a pragmatic account.Keywords: scalar implicatures, quantification, typicality * We are indebted to Emmanuel Chemla and Benjamin Spector for giving us permission to use their raw experimental data, and to Corien Bary, Chris Cummins, Larry Horn, Louise McNally, Sammie Tarenskeen, Rob van der Sandt, Noor van Leusen, Emiel van Miltenburg, and an anonymous reviewer for S&P, for their extremely useful comments and questions.

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“…However, I argue that just pursuing the first direction is insufficient to resolve the issues embedded implicatures raise fully. In particular, I show that independent pragmatic constraints -in particular, the constraint of Truth Dominance (Meyer & Sauerland 2009) -predict conditions on when embedded implicatures can be detected that are largely independent of the account of embedded implicatures assumed. Therefore, the observations on the presence and absence of (embedded) implicatures by G&P and C are consistent with much wider range of theories of implicatures than what the original papers say.…”

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confidence: 86%

“…From work on scope ambiguity resolution, it is independently known that speakers' intuitions are affected by the entailment relation between the two readings. I adopt the principle Truth Dominance from Meyer & Sauerland (2009) to account for this effect because one case they consider is exactly analogous to (8), 5 namely, the German example (9). Most theories of quantifier scope in German predict (9) to be ambiguous between two structural representations that should give rise to the two readings given below (9).…”

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confidence: 99%