Some implicatures reveal semantic differences

Banga, Arina; Heutinck, I.; Berends, Sanne; Hendriks, Petra

doi:10.1075/avt.26.02ban

Cited by 14 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…While the results of Rubio-Fernandez and colleagues (2017) support their theory that comparison and categorization statements are scalar expressions, the results of their three sentence-verification experiments differ markedly from other scalar implicature studies testing "some" and "all" (for example, Banga et al, 2009;Bott & Noveck, 2004;Bott et al, 2012;Chemla & Bott, 2014;Cremers & Chemla, 2014;Degen & Goodman, 2014;De Neys & Schaeken, 2007;Feeney et al, 2004;Guasti et al, 2005;Hunt et al, 2013;Noveck, 2001;Noveck & Posada, 2003;Politzer-Ahles et al, 2013;Pouscoulous et al, 2007;Tavano & Kaiser, 2010;Tomlinson et al, 2013;Spychalska et al, 2016;van Tiel & Schnaeken, 2017;van Tiel et al, 2019). Specifically, participants in Rubio-Fernandez et al (2017) accepted underinformative comparisons as TRUE (e.g., "This one is like a tiger" predicated of a tiger) at considerably higher rates than those observed for underinformative statements with "some" (e.g., "Some elephants have trunks") in other studies using sentence verification (see Figure 1 for a summary illustration).…”

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confidence: 84%

Some sentences prime pragmatic reasoning in the verification and evaluation of comparisons.

Shukla¹,

Long²,

Bhatia³

et al. 2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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While most research on scalar implicature has focused on the lexical scale "some" vs "all," here we investigated an understudied scale formed by two syntactic constructions: categorizations (e.g., "Wilma is a nurse") and comparisons ("Wilma is like a nurse"). An experimental study by Rubio-Fernandez et al. (2017) showed high rates of logical responses to superordinate comparisons, even though they are underinformative when interpreted pragmatically (e.g., "A robin is like a bird" implies that a robin is not a bird). Based on recent studies on enrichment priming, we predicted that including "some" and "all" statements (which typically elicit high rates of pragmatic responses) in sentence verification and sentence evaluation tasks would introduce an informativity bias, increasing pragmatic responses to superordinate comparisons. The results of three Web-based experiments supported our predictions, showing that different scalar expressions not only give rise to different rates of scalar implicatures, but can also affect the degree to which an experimental task elicits pragmatic reasoning.

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mentioning

confidence: 84%

Some sentences prime pragmatic reasoning in the verification and evaluation of comparisons.

Shukla¹,

Long²,

Bhatia³

et al. 2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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“…The implicature control items consisted of two sentence types with the scalar expressions sommige “some 1 ” (6) or enkele “some 2 ” (7) (24 items per sentence type). In contrast to enkele , which merely expresses existential quantification (“there are some…”), sommige additionally indicates that the individuals introduced by the quantifier have something in common that distinguishes them from other individuals (de Hoop and Kas, 1989 ; Banga et al, 2009 ). For each item, a different intransitive verb was used (e.g., fishing, dancing, singing, and sleeping).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…. "), sommige additionally indicates that the individuals introduced by the quantifier have something in common that distinguishes them from other individuals (de Hoop and Kas, 1989;Banga et al, 2009). For each item, a different intransitive verb was used (e.g., fishing, dancing, singing, and sleeping).…”

Section: Implicature Control Itemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Child-Like Adults: Dual-Task Effects on Collective vs. Distributive Sentence Interpretations

2021

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In this work, we consider a recent proposal that claims that the preferred interpretation of sentences containing definite plural expressions, such as “The boys are building a snowman,” is not determined by semantic composition but is pragmatically derived via an implicature. Plural expressions can express that each member of a group acts individually (distributive interpretation) or that the group acts together (collective interpretation). While adults prefer collective interpretations for sentences that are not explicitly marked for distributivity by the distributive marker each, children do not show this preference. One explanation is that the adult collective preference for definite plurals arises due to a conversational implicature. If implicature calculation requires memory resources, children may fail to calculate the implicature due to memory limitations. This study investigated whether loading Dutch-speaking adults' working memory, using a dual task, would elicit more child-like distributive interpretations, as would be predicted by the implicature account. We found that loading WM in adults did lead to response patterns more similar to children. We discuss whether our results offer a plausible explanation for children's development of an understanding of distributivity and how our results relate to recent debates on the role of cognitive resources in implicature calculation.

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“…1 tested the partitive 'some of the' instead of the bare form 'enkele' (= 'some') that was tested by Geurts and Pouscoulous. It has been observed that partitives lead to higher rates of UBCs than bare forms (e.g., Banga et al, 2009).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reasoning with ‘Some’

Tiel

Noveck

Kissine

2018

Journal of Semantics

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There has been substantial debate about the question of whether 'some' is normally interpreted as 'some but not all' when it is embedded under a quantifying expression. Experiments using a sentence-picture verification paradigm have been equivocal: while Geurts & Pouscoulous (2009) report that embedded upper-bounded construals of 'some' are almost non-existent, Potts et al. (2016) observed substantial rates of upper-bounded construals in at least some embedding environments. In this paper, we investigate how it is possible that these two superficially similar studies provide such diverging sets of results. We show that subtle features of the displays influence the frequency of embedded upper-bounded construals. We discuss the consequences of these findings for theories of upper-bounded construals and for experimental research in pragmatics in general.

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Some implicatures reveal semantic differences

Cited by 14 publications

References 9 publications

Some sentences prime pragmatic reasoning in the verification and evaluation of comparisons.

Some sentences prime pragmatic reasoning in the verification and evaluation of comparisons.

Child-Like Adults: Dual-Task Effects on Collective vs. Distributive Sentence Interpretations

Reasoning with ‘Some’

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