Embedded implicatures?!?

Geurts, Bart; Pouscoulous, Nausicaa

doi:10.3765/sp.2.4

Cited by 50 publications

(75 citation statements)

References 12 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Oddly enough, however, advocates of the Gricean programme have been perfectly happy to concede that these data cannot be accounted for in terms of conversational implicature (e.g., Horn 1989, Geurts 2009, Geurts & Pouscoulous 2009. In fact, none of the data mustered by Chierchia, Fox & Spector (2012) in their broadside attack on Gricean pragmatics are particularly worrisome for the defenders of that view.…”

Section: What the Debate Is Not Aboutmentioning

confidence: 97%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Embedded scalars

Geurts

Tiel

2013

S&P

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Section: What the Debate Is Not Aboutmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Let's develop the main positions on embedded UBCs a bit further by focusing on an example over which opinions are strongly divided (Geurts & Pouscoulous 2009): (8) All the squares are connected with some of the circles.…”

Section: The Division Of Labour Between Narrowing and Implicaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Embedded scalars

Geurts

Tiel

2013

S&P

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…It is not strictly speaking necessary, but it will simplify the solution concept that this paper introduces dramatically, so much so that we can altogether ignore the precise values of probabilities, which, I believe, is a great relief to the working linguist who may prefer not to have to deal with the details of information theory and probability reasoning. (But see also Geurts & Pouscoulous (2009a) for arguments that beliefs about likely worldly states of affairs often do not seem to impact quantity reasoning. )…”

Section: Base-level Interpretation Gamesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantity implicatures, exhaustive interpretation, and rational conversation

Franke

2011

S&P

169

112

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Quantity implicatures are inferences triggered by an utterance based on what other utterances a speaker could have made instead. Using ideas and formalisms from game theory, I demonstrate that these inferences can be explained in a strictly Gricean sense as rational behavior. To this end, I offer a procedure for constructing the context of utterance insofar as it is relevant for quantity reasoning as a game between speaker and hearer. I then give a new solution concept that improves on classical equilibrium approaches in that it uniquely selects the desired "empirically correct" play in these interpretation games by a chain of back-and-forth reasoning about players' behavior. To make this formal approach more accessible to a wider audience, I give a simple algorithm with the help of which the model's solution can be computed without having to do heavy calculations of probabilities, expected utilities and the like. This rationalistic approach subsumes and improves on recent exhaustivity-based approaches. It makes correct and uniform predictions for quantity implicatures of various epistemic varieties, free choice readings of disjunctions, as well as a phenomenon tightly related to the latter, namely so-called "simplification of disjunctive antecedents".

show abstract

“…But more generally, this type of analysis suggests that the experimental data are running way ahead of any really satisfactory or comprehensive explanation. It would be unhelpful, and untrue, for me to assert that so much is going on in the paradigms of Geurts & Pouscoulous (2009), Clifton & Dube (2010, and Chemla & Spector (2011) that we can't yet make any kind of sense of the results. However, I think it is fair to say that the original analyses of these data sets rely on simplifying assumptions that…”

Section: (7)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Typicality made familiar: A commentary on Geurts and van Tiel (2013)

Cummins

2014

S&P

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In their recent paper, Geurts & van Tiel (2013) review a range of evidence on the availability of embedded scalar enrichments (upper-bound construals, or UBCs). They argue that these readings are not readily available, except when triggered by contrast effects, and conclude that the experimental data do not support a conventionalist view of implicature. They also consider how some of these data can be analysed as exhibiting typicality effects. In this commentary, I focus on the claim that typicality effects apply to quantifiers, and consider some of its implications for our view of semantics and pragmatics. In particular, I look at whether these effects are general to embedded and non-embedded contexts, whether and how typicality relates to truth-conditional narrowing, and the implications of this view for the nature of pragmatic enrichment. I conclude that typicality effects are indeed in evidence in the data elicited so far, and that this opens up several promising new avenues for the study of quantification in natural language, as well as challenging our interpretation of existing data.

show abstract

Embedded implicatures?!?

Cited by 50 publications

References 12 publications

Embedded scalars

Embedded scalars

Quantity implicatures, exhaustive interpretation, and rational conversation

Typicality made familiar: A commentary on Geurts and van Tiel (2013)

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About