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

Abstract

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.

Partial plurality inferences of plural pronouns and dynamic pragmatic enrichment

“…An alternative is to assume that (i) a context is a set of information states and (ii) a formula denotes a function from an input context to an output context. Sudo (2023) adopts this option: he defines a possibility as a set of pairs of a possible world and a (set of) variable assignment(s). Both options work the same in most cases, i.e.…”

“…In this section, I discuss Sudo (2023), who derives partial plurality inferences as dynamic global implicatures based on plural information states. My contribution is just an addition of dynamic anti-presupposition to it.…”

“…3.1 Dynamic scalar implicature Sudo (2023) points out that the Gricean tradition and the dynamic tradition developed independently and their expected interaction has not been fully explored. On the Gricean side, an utterance triggers an implicature if there is more informative alternatives.…”

“…18 Note that only the distributive one matters for my purpose. 19 (Sudo 2023) calls a set of possibilities an information state. In this paper, I call it a context.…”

“…Every passenger of this flight lost their suitcases. (Sudo 2023) (1a) is true iff exactly one coat has multiple pockets and other coats do not have any pocket. 1 Similarly, (1b) presupposes that every passenger has at least one suitcases and at least one passenger have multiple suitcases.…”