Embedded scalars

Abstract

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.

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

“…Geurts & van Tiel (2013) review three experimental papers on this topic: Geurts & Pouscoulous 2009, which argued that embedded UBCs are very infrequently in evidence, and Clifton &Dube 2010 andChemla &Spector 2011, which argued that embedded UBCs are relatively widespread in a way that suggests the inadequacy of a Gricean pragmatic account. 1 Geurts & van Tiel criticise these latter two papers on two distinct grounds.…”

“…All three papers discussed by Geurts & van Tiel (2013) report experiments using broadly similar materials: these were ostensibly meaningless geometrical diagrams consisting of connected squares, circles, and letters. Participants were then asked to rate sentences such as (1), repeated below, as descriptions of these diagrams.…”

“…In support of the claim that typicality offers a better explanation of the experimental data, Geurts & van Tiel (2013) adopt a typicality measure introduced by van Tiel (2013), which can be used to quantify how typical a situation is as an instantiation of a sentence. They demonstrate how this method can be applied to the materials used by Chemla & Spector (2011).…”

“…For the sentence (1), this would involve calculating the typicality of the description "connected to some of the circles" for each square separately, and combining these typicality ratings into a single measure, by taking either their arithmetic or harmonic mean. Geurts & van Tiel 2013 show that a measure of this type 1 To infer (2) from the utterance of (1) in a Gricean fashion, we would require some auxiliary assumption, for instance that every square is connected to the same number of circles. It seems possible, even within a classically Gricean analysis, that an utterance such as (1) might influence our beliefs as to whether an appropriate auxiliary assumption also holds.…”

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AbstractIn 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.

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