Informativeness, relevance and scalar implicature

Carston, Robyn

doi:10.1075/pbns.37.11car

Cited by 275 publications

(144 citation statements)

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“…These findings come from a set of studies designed to investigate children's sensitivity to a class of conversational inferences known as scalar implicatures (Carston, 1998;Gazdar, 1979;Grice, 1989;Harnish, 1976;Hirschberg, 1985;Horn, 1972;Levinson, 2000;Sperber & Wilson, 1995; among many others). Scalar implicatures arise in examples like Some students can write well where the speaker's use of some typically indicates that s/he had reasons not to use a more informative term, e.g.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children's command of quantification

2002

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In this article we present data from two sets of experiments designed to investigate how children and adult speakers of English and Kannada (Dravidian) interpret scopally ambiguous sentences containing numerally quantified noun phrases and negation (e.g. Donald didn't find two guys). We use this kind of sentence as a way to find evidence in children's linguistic representations for the hierarchical structure and the abstract relations defined over these structures (in particular, the relation of c-command) that linguists take to be at the core of grammatical knowledge. Specifically, we uncover the existence of systematic differences in the way that children and adult speakers resolve these ambiguities, independent of the language they speak. That is, while adults can easily access either scope interpretation, 4-year-old children display a strong preference for the scopal interpretation of the quantified elements which corresponds to their surface syntactic position. Crucially, however, we show that children's interpretations are constrained by the surface hierarchical relations (i.e. the c-command relations) between these elements and not by their linear order. Children's non-adult interpretations are therefore informative about the nature of the syntactic representations they entertain and the rules they use to determine the meaning of a sentence from its structure. q

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children's command of quantification

2002

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“…Relevance theory (Carston, 1998(Carston, , 2004Sperber & Wilson, 1995;Wilson & Sperber, 2004), on the other hand, approaches implicatures in a completely different way. This theory is grounded in the field of cognitive sciences.…”

Section: Everybody Goes To the Partymentioning

confidence: 99%

Some effort for some: Further evidence that scalar implicatures are effortful

Dieussaert

Verkerk

Gillard

et al. 2011

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

103

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Under the assumption of the principle of cooperation (Grice, 1989), a statement such as "some eels are fish" is thought to be false since it contains less information than is considered sufficient. However, the statement is logically sound since the meaning of "some" is compatible with "all". Currently, the primary interpretation of such underinformative statements remains subject to debate. According to Levinson (2000), the pragmatic "some but not all" interpretation is the default interpretation, while others (e.g., Sperber & Wilson, 1995) argue that this pragmatic interpretation only comes to the fore when relevant within the context and is thus considered secondary to the logical "some and perhaps all" interpretation. In this study, three factors that may influence the answer pattern are studied: task load, working memory capacity, and repetition of the statements. In Experiment 1, we used a secondary task paradigm to manipulate the cognitive load under which a number of underinformative statements had to be judged. We observed that for participants with a rather limited working memory span it is harder to reach a pragmatic interpretation under cognitive load. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the repetition of the statements. We observed that with a higher number of filler statements, participants produced fewer consistent answer patterns. This study provides further evidence against the automaticity of the pragmatic interpretation: It shows that the pragmatic interpretation requires more cognitive effort than the logical interpretation and that increasing the number of filler statements inhibits the development of a response strategy.

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“…Desde un punto de vista contextualista, se ha planteado la posibilidad de que el significado de los tn esté subespecificado lingüísticamente (Carston, 1998;Atlas, 2005). De esta manera, el significado de un término n estaría dado por '[X] n', donde X simboliza una variable que puede adquirir uno de tres valores posibles en cada contexto de emisión: 'exactamente n' (= n), 'al menos n' (n ≤) o 'cuando mucho n' (n ≥).…”

Section: La Visión Contextualista Radical Sobre El Significado De Losunclassified

“…De esta manera, el significado de un término n estaría dado por '[X] n', donde X simboliza una variable que puede adquirir uno de tres valores posibles en cada contexto de emisión: 'exactamente n' (= n), 'al menos n' (n ≤) o 'cuando mucho n' (n ≥). Para Carston (1998), el significado de los tn no involucra una escala lingüística ni surge como resultado de la derivación de una implicatura, sino que, dado que contribuye a las condiciones de verdad de la proposición expresada tivo sería algunos y el fuerte o más informativo sería todos. Cuando un hablante utilice el tér-mino algunos, el oyente derivará la implicatura escalar 'no todos'.…”

Section: La Visión Contextualista Radical Sobre El Significado De Losunclassified

Interpretación de términos numéricos: un estudio empírico

García

2018

ELA

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Informativeness, relevance and scalar implicature

Cited by 275 publications

References 21 publications

Children's command of quantification

Children's command of quantification

Some effort for some: Further evidence that scalar implicatures are effortful

Interpretación de términos numéricos: un estudio empírico

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