Scalar Diversity

Tiel, Bob van; Miltenburg, Emiel van; Zevakhina, Natalia; Geurts, Bart

doi:10.1093/jos/ffu017

Cited by 79 publications

(226 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…As suggested by the reviewers of this paper, the effect generated by lexical scales with logical connectives (e.g., < and, or >), quantifiers (e.g., < all, many, some >) and modals (< allowed, obligatory >) could be stronger than other scales such as < bright, intelligent >. Supporting this hypothesis, Van Tiel et al (2016) have argued, based on experimental investigations, that some scales (notably < all, many, some > and < and, or >) induce a much higher rate of pragmatic interpretations for scalar implicatures than do others (e.g., < small, tiny >). Although we have checked our results by scale and observed that our significant priming effect from Implication minus Implicature conditions is observed for the majority of the scales we tested, independently of the type of lexical scale or the number of items it contains (see “Supplementary Presentation 1” for an exploratory analysis by scale), we did not conduct statistical analyses using “scale” as a factor, because for each subject we had only one data point per scale in each condition.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 53%

“…Further investigations using the same methodology exploited in this paper (masked priming) could, however, be done to address the question of the differences in the magnitude of the effect across scales. For instance, it would be important to investigate more precisely whether the variability between scales that has been evidenced in recent work using other experimental methods (see Van Tiel et al, 2016) and seems to be present in our data (see “Supplementary Presentation 1”), could be replicated in other studies with specific predictions about how and why some lexical scales can behave differently in they way they induce pragmatic interpretations. Nevertheless, our results are entirely compatible with the idea that scales may differ in how strongly they mandate pragmatic interpretations, or in the degree of automaticity with which they are accessed in the interpretation of scalar implicatures.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 59%

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Scalar Implicatures: The Psychological Reality of Scales

et al. 2016

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Scalar implicatures, the phenomena where a sentence like “The pianist played some Mozart sonatas” is interpreted, as “The pianist did not play all Mozart sonatas” have been given two different analyses. Neo-Griceans (NG) claim that this interpretation is based on lexical scales (e.g., ), where the stronger term (e.g., all) implies the weaker term (e.g., some), but the weaker term (e.g., some) implicates the negation of the stronger term (i.e., some = not all). Post-Griceans (PG) deny that this is the case and offer a context-based inferential account for scalar implicatures. While scalar implicatures have been extensively investigated, with results apparently in favor of PG accounts, the psychological reality of lexical scales has not been put to the test. This is what we have done in the present experiment, with a lexical decision task using lexical scales in a masked priming paradigm. While PG accounts do not attribute any role for lexical scales in the computation of scalar implicatures, NG accounts suggest that lexical scales are the core mechanism behind the computation of scalar implicatures, and predict that weaker terms in a scale should prime stronger terms more than the reverse because stronger words are necessary to the interpretation of weaker words, while stronger words can be interpreted independently of weaker words. Our results provided evidence in favor of the psychological existence of scales, leading to the first clear experimental support for the NG account.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 53%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 59%

Scalar Implicatures: The Psychological Reality of Scales

et al. 2016

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“…At one extreme, the same mechanisms could be used to derive quantifier, number and ad hoc enrichments. While there is variability across EVAs in the rate of enrichments (e.g., van Tiel, van Miltenburg, Zevakhina, & Geurts, 2014), this could be explained by differences in the frequencies of the alternatives, or some other factor linked to the idiosyncratic properties of the trigger expression. At the other extreme, each EVA could have its own distinct set of mechanisms.…”

Section: Shared and Distinct Enrichment Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shared and distinct mechanisms in deriving linguistic enrichment

Bott

Chemla

2016

Journal of Memory and Language

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a b s t r a c tMeanings of basic expressions can be enriched by considering what the speaker could have said, but chose not to, that is, the alternatives. We report three priming experiments that test whether there are shared enrichment mechanisms across a diverse range of linguistic categories. We find that quantifier, number, and ad hoc enrichments exhibit robust priming within their categories and between each other. Plural enrichments, in contrast, demonstrate within-category priming but no between-category priming. Our results demonstrate that (1) enrichment typically thought of as pragmatic or semantic can be primed in the same way as syntactic structures and (2) there are mechanisms that are shared across different enrichment categories, and that some phenomena (e.g., plurals) are excluded from this class. We discuss the implications of our findings for psychological models of enrichment, theories of individual categories of enrichment, and structural priming.

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“…It may be that frequently drawn scalar implicatures lexicalize to avoid cost, whereas infrequent ones are derived online to avoid more complex lexical representations during acquisition. Such a prediction would lend itself to empirical testing in line with a recent interest in differences between various scalar implicature triggers (van Tiel, van Miltenburg, Zevakhina, & Geurts, ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 57%

Coevolution of Lexical Meaning and Pragmatic Use

2018

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According to standard linguistic theory, the meaning of an utterance is the product of conventional semantic meaning and general pragmatic rules on language use. We investigate how such a division of labor between semantics and pragmatics could evolve under general processes of selection and learning. We present a game‐theoretic model of the competition between types of language users, each endowed with certain lexical representations and a particular pragmatic disposition to act on them. Our model traces two evolutionary forces and their interaction: (i) pressure toward communicative efficiency and (ii) transmission perturbations during the acquisition of linguistic knowledge. We illustrate the model based on a case study on scalar implicatures, which suggests that the relationship between underspecified semantics and pragmatic inference is one of coevolution.

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Scalar Diversity

Cited by 79 publications

References 45 publications

Scalar Implicatures: The Psychological Reality of Scales

Scalar Implicatures: The Psychological Reality of Scales

Shared and distinct mechanisms in deriving linguistic enrichment

Coevolution of Lexical Meaning and Pragmatic Use

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