Janus sentences: a puzzle for theories of local implicatures

Scalar implicature is not a default process: An ERP study of the scalar implicature processing under the effect of focus factor

Scalar implicatures: experiments at the semantics–pragmatics interface

A number of studies have demonstrated pragmatic language difficulties in people with Schizophrenia Spectrum and Other Psychotic Disorders. However, research about how people with schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders understand scalar implicatures (SIs) is surprisingly rare, since SIs have generated much of the most recent literature. Scalar implicatures are pragmatic inferences, based on linguistic expressions like some, must, or, which are part of a scale of informativeness (e.g., some/many/all). Logically, the less informative expressions imply the more informative ones, but pragmatically people usually infer that the presence of a less informative term implies that the more informative term was not applicable. In one of the few existing studies with people with schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders, Wampers et al. (2018) observed that in general, people with schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders were less likely to derive SIs than controls. The current study has three main aims. First, we want to replicate the original finding with the scalar terms some-all. Second, we want to investigate how these patients deal with different scalar terms, that is, we want to investigate if scalar diversity is also observed in this clinical group. Third, we investigate the role of working memory, often seen as another important mechanism to enable inferring SIs. Twenty-one individuals with a psychotic disorder and 21 matched controls answered 54 under-informative statements, in which seven different pairs of scalar terms were used. In addition, working memory capacity was measured. Patients with schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders did not make more logical interpretations when processing quantifiers, disconfirming Wampers et al. (2018). However, certain scalar scales elicited more pragmatic interpretations than others, which is in line with the scalar diversity hypothesis. Additionally, we observed only partial evidence for the role of working memory. Only for the scalar scale and-or, a significant effect of working memory was observed. The implications of these results for patients with schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders are discussed, but also the role of working memory for pragmatic inferences, as well as the place of SIs in experimental pragmatics.

Research on the effect of face-orientation on scalar implicatures has claimed that face-threatening contexts are one type of context in which scalar implicatures are not warranted. However, that research has been based on the two staples of scalar implicature research, some and or. Given research on scalar diversity has shown that these terms are rather exceptional in inducing high rates of scalar implicatures, we believe it is time for a reassessment. We explored the relationship between scalar implicatures and face concerns by means of an experiment involving eight types of scalar terms in face-boosting and face-threatening contexts. While our results showed that some and or reliably tended to induce scalar implicatures in both types of contexts, confirming the findings of scalar diversity research in this respect, we failed to replicate previous findings that face-threatening contexts do not induce scalar implicatures. We discuss reasons for these findings and how face concerns should be implemented for future experimentation in this vein.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Pragmatics: From Theory to Experiment and Back Again

Some scales require cognitive effort: A systematic review on the role of working memory in scalar implicature derivation

Where previous studies supported the effect of the contextual property of Question Under Discussion (QUD) and focus on the scalar implicature of or, this paper presents two experiments that replicate this effect with the scalar term most. Both experiments show that, while story and target sentence are kept constant, more scalar implicatures are calculated when the scalar term is in the focus (new information) part of the sentence. In the experiments, the focus is manipulated by an explicit QUD. It is shown that the effect also holds for sentential answers to yes/no-questions, and might even extend to scalar implicatures in questions themselves.

This research explores the phenomenon of scalar implicature in Facebook status updates, using Yule's systems theory to dissect the implied meanings conveyed through scalar expressions. The research reveals that scalar implicature significantly influences communication on Facebook, providing more insight into the construction of implicatures. Noteworthy findings include examples of scalar implicature in status updates featuring terms such as "some", "few", "more", "more", "many", "all", "most", and "none". This research aims to find out how these scalar terms are used by Facebook users to communicate nuanced messages behind the explicit substance of the status, underscore the importance of understanding the interaction between scalar terms, pragmatic elements, and semantic components for effective communication on platforms such as Facebook. Using a qualitative descriptive approach, the research examined data drawn from Facebook status updates to underscore the intricate relationship between scalar expressions and pragmatic and semantic elements in communication. The listening method combined with reading, selecting, and note-taking techniques produced the data. Statements, details, and proverbs that appear in the status updates of the author's Facebook page This study underscores how users use scalar terms to effectively communicate nuanced meanings and intentions on social media platforms such as Facebook. By emphasizing the importance of understanding scalar implicatures in achieving communication goals, this study highlights the use of language in everyday online interactions. The implications of this study extend to a broader understanding of language use in social media settings, emphasizing the critical role of scalar implicatures in facilitating effective communication.

“Yixie” is likely not created equal for everyone: Distinct reasoning procedures in interpreting the same scalar quantifier

A aquisição de implicatura escalar sempre foi tema caro aos pesquisadores interessados em testar os limites entre a compreensão semântica e a pragmática das crianças. Em nosso experimento, aplicado a crianças de nove anos adquirindo português brasileiro, sentenças análogas contendo termos escalares fracos eram proferidas em contextos lower-bound e em contextos upper-bound, de maneira que tivemos oportunidade de testar a capacidade infantil de dar interpretação estritamente semântica (lower-bound) ou de implicatura escalar (upper-bound) aos termos escalares testados dependendo, apenas, da influência contextual. Identificamos nas crianças testadas sensibilidade contextual capaz de garantir interpretação semântica ou de implicatura escalar dependendo do contexto apresentado. Entretanto, uma dificuldade inesperada, por parte dos sujeitos, foi notada: como as histórias formadoras de contextos lower-bound continham porções cujo entendimento requeria cálculo de consequências lógicas, menor sucesso na interpretação desses trechos foi apresentado pelas crianças. Temos, assim, indicativo de capacidade lógica inferencial bem desenvolvida nas crianças mediante desafios de interpretação linguística, tais como de implicatura escalar (a partir já dos quatro anos de idade, segundo Papafragou e Tantalou (2004), e de deficiente habilidade na computação de determinadas inferências não linguísticas, referentes a objetos ou eventos contextuais, ainda demonstrada por crianças de nove anos. Propomos que o componente exclusivo das inferências linguísticas que permite às crianças sucesso em sua computação seja o mindreading, a capacidade de identificar intenções alheias. Trata-se de uma proposta que encontra suporte na hipótese da Teoria da Relevância de existência de um sub-módulo de mindreading na cognição humana especializado na computação de inferências linguísticas.

This study investigated the understanding of underinformative sentences like “Some elephants have trunks” by children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The scalar term ‘some’ can be interpreted pragmatically, ‘Not all elephants have trunks,’ or logically, ‘Some and possibly all elephants have trunks.’ Literature indicates that adults with ASD show no real difficulty in interpreting scalar implicatures, i.e., they often interpret them pragmatically, as controls do. This contrasts with the traditional claim of difficulties of people with ASD in other pragmatic domains, and is more in line with the idea that pragmatic problems are not universal. The aim of this study was to: (a) gain insight in the ability of children with ASD to derive scalar implicatures, and (b) do this by assessing not only sensitivity to underinformativeness, but also different degrees of tolerance to violations of informativeness. We employed a classic statement-evaluation task, presenting optimal, logical false, and underinformative utterances. In Experiment 1, children had to express their judgment on a binary option ‘I agree’ vs. ‘I disagree.’ In Experiment 2, a ternary middle answer option ‘I agree a bit’ was also available. Sixty-six Flemish-speaking 10-year-old children were tested: 22 children with ASD, an IQ-matched group, and an age-matched group. In the binary judgment task, the ASD group gave more pragmatic answers than the other groups, which was significant in the mixed effects logistic regression analysis, although not in the non-parametric analysis. In the ternary judgment task, the children with ASD showed a dichotomized attitude toward the speaker’s meaning, by tending to either fully agree or fully disagree with underinformative statements, in contrast with TD children, who preferred the middle option. Remarkably, the IQ-matched group exhibited the same pattern of results as the ASD group. Thanks to a fine-grained measure such as the ternary judgment task, this study highlighted a neglected aspect of the pragmatic profile of ASD, whose struggle with social communication seems to affect also the domain of informativeness. We discuss the implications of the dichotomized reaction toward violations of informativeness in terms of the potential role of ASD and of cognitive and verbal abilities.

This paper is devoted to the effect of negative polarity on presuppositions and scalar implicatures, negative quantifiers and negative events. The main thesis is that the semantics of negation, depending on its scope, do not cover all the properties and relations of the sentence meaning. When ordinary negation is used, it does not touch the presupposition whereas when negation is metalinguistics, it either asserts or negates the proposition, and either asserts or negates its implication. When negation is used with a negative particular (down-bounded quantifier), it preserves its negative scalar up-bounded implicature. Finally, when used with an event, negation preserves the relational domain of the semantics of event, i.e. its temporal (directional) inference. These properties of negation contrast with the complement function of logical negation.

This study aims to test whether or not the computation of scalar implicatures in child Mandarin is influenced by the entailment properties of linguistic contexts. Experiment 1 compared adults’ and children’s interpretations of the scalar term huozhe ‘or’, when it appeared in the two arguments of the universal quantifier mei ‘every’. The results showed that Mandarin-speaking adults accepted huozhe as compatible with he ‘and’ in the (downward entailing) restrictor of mei, but not in the (non-downward entailing) nuclear scope of mei, indicating that adults’ calculation of scalar implicatures is sensitive to the influence of entailment patterns. Unlike adults, 4–5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children persistently interpreted huozhe as compatible with he in both contexts. Two further experiments confirmed that children were insensitive to scalar implicatures related to huozhe in non-downward entailing contexts (Experiment 2), unless alternative sentences containing the scalar terms huozhe and he were explicitly presented (Experiment 3). Taken together with previous child studies, the experimental findings suggest that scalar implicatures are not derived in downward entailing contexts. In addition, young children do not spontaneously compute scalar implicatures to the same extent as adults do in non-downward entailing contexts. In both cases, then, young children appear to interpret disjunction as its meaning in classical logic, i.e., inclusive-or.

We compare two aspects of meaning, namely the presupposition of stop in the scope of negation (John didn’t stop going to the movies. ↪ John used to go to the movies.) and the scalar implicature associated with the strong scalar item always under negation (didn’t always go to the movies. ↪ John sometimes went to the movies.) (‘Indirect Scalar Implicatures’ (ISIs); Chierchia, Structures and Beyond, 2004). In our results, ISIs are found to pattern with presuppositions in that responses reflecting an interpretation without an inference (corresponding to a ‘literal’ interpretation) are slower than ones based on the relevant inference (Chemla and Bott, Lang Cogn Process, 38:241–260, 2013), contrary to what has been found for direct scalar implicatures (Bott and Noveck, J Mem Lang, 51:437–457, 2004, among others). These results are puzzling from the traditional perspective that ISIs are generated in the same way as direct implicatures. We explore two possible interpretations: first, strong scalar terms could receive a presuppositional analysis as well and presuppose that their domain is non-empty. Alternatively, we could group stop and ISIs together from another angle and see them as obligatory scalar implicatures, in contrast to the non-obligatory direct ones.

There is a vast amount of studies on some forms of implicit communication such as scalar implicatures by monolingual speakers, but few studies have been carried out on the pragmatic capacities of second language learners. The only available data have been collected in Slabakova (2010). This study has shown that L2 learners are more pragmatic than L1 speakers by interpreting a scalar term in their L2. However the replicability of the results has been called into question because of methodological issues and conclusions ignoring empirical data on cognitive processing of scalar implicatures. We therefore used the same experimental material as Slabakova (2010) but improved the methodology and asked two groups of L2 French learners to make a sentence verification task. After a short context, they had to judge an underinformative sentence based on the scalar terms , ( ). The L2 learners have been tested in their two languages and compared to a sample of French monolinguals. The results of Slabakova (2010) have been replicated since the L2 learners make more inferences in French as monolinguals do. Our results also show that the L2 learners more often derive implicatures in their L1 than monolinguals in the same L1. This suggests that learning a second language has an impact on the way to communicate not only in the L2 but also in the L1.