Reasoning with ‘Some’

Tiel, Bob van; Noveck, Ira; Kissine, Mikhaïl

doi:10.1093/jos/ffy012

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 51 publications

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“…There are now many accounts for this sort of pragmatic inference, many of which rely on the notion of scales (All entails Some), which is why this inference is usually called a scalar implicature. This sort of pragmatic inference has been intensively studied for over two decades now and has led to much experimentation (e.g., [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What second-language speakers can tell us about pragmatic processing

et al. 2022

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Upon hearing the phrase Some cats meow, a listener might pragmatically infer that ‘Some but not all cats meow’. This is known as a scalar implicature and it often arises when a speaker produces a weak linguistic expression instead of a stronger one. Several L2 studies claim that pragmatic inferences are generated by default and their comprehension presents no challenges to L2 learners. However, the evidence obtained from these studies largely stems from offline-based tasks that provide limited information about how scalar implicatures are processed. This study investigated scalar implicature processing among L2 speakers of English and the degree to which differences in L2 proficiency and Theory of Mind abilities would modulate pragmatic responding. The experiment used an online sentence verification paradigm that required participants to judge, among multiple control items, the veracity of under-informative sentences, such as Some cats are mammals, and to respond as quickly as possible. A true response to this item is indicative of a logical some and perhaps all reading and a false response to a pragmatic some but not all reading. Our results showed evidence that scalar inferences are not generated by default. The answer linked to the pragmatic reading some but not all took significantly longer to make relative to the answer that relies on the logical interpretation some and perhaps all. This processing slowdown was also significantly larger among participants with lower English proficiency. Further exploratory analyses of participants’ Theory of Mind, as measured by the Social Skill subscale in the Autism Spectrum Quotient, revealed that socially inclined participants are more likely than the socially disinclined to derive a scalar inference. These results together provide new empirical insights into how L2 learners process scalar implicatures and thus implications for processing theories in experimental pragmatics and second language acquisition.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What second-language speakers can tell us about pragmatic processing

et al. 2022

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Scalar implicatures with discourse referents: a case study on plurality inferences

Sudo

2023

Linguist and Philos

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This paper explores the idea that scalar implicatures are computed with respect to discourse referents. Given the general consensus that a proper account of pronominal anaphora in natural language requires discourse referents separately from the truth-conditional meaning, it is naturally expected that the anaphoric information that discourse referents carry play a role in the computation of scalar implicatures, but the literature has so far mostly exclusively focused on the truth-conditional dimension of meaning. This paper offers a formal theory of scalar implicatures with discourse referents couched in dynamic semantics, and demonstrates its usefulness through a case study on the plurality inferences of plural nouns in English.

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Experimenting with every American king

Mankowitz

2023

Nat Lang Semantics

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The standard contemporary semantics for ‘every’ predict the truth of occurrences of sentences with restrictors that denote the empty set, such as ‘Every American king lives in New York’. The literature on empty restrictors has been concerned with explaining a particular violation of this prediction: many assessors consider empty-restrictor sentences to be odd rather than valued, and they are apparently more likely to do so when such sentences include determiners like ‘every’ as opposed to those like ‘no’. Empirical investigation of this issue is overdue, and I present the results of three experimental surveys. The first unexpected outcome is that there is no evidence of a contrast in assessors’ tendencies to judge sentences to be odd based on determiner type. An additional surprising result is that those assessors who assign a truth value to sentences where ‘every’ combines with an empty restrictor overwhelmingly assign the value false. The full results do not fit straightforwardly with any existing account.

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Reasoning with ‘Some’

Cited by 5 publications

References 51 publications

What second-language speakers can tell us about pragmatic processing

What second-language speakers can tell us about pragmatic processing

Scalar implicatures with discourse referents: a case study on plurality inferences

Experimenting with every American king

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