Abstract
A conversational implicature arises when there is a gap between the syntactically and semantically encoded meaning of a sentence and the pragmatic meaning that is inferred in an actual communicative situation. Several experimental studies have approached the processing of implicatures and examined the extent to which the derivation of the pragmatic meaning is effortful, especially in the case of generalized implicatures, where the inferred meaning seems to be the most frequent one. In this study, we present two experiments that explore the processing of scalar implicatures with algunos ‘some’ in adjacency pair contexts through an acceptability judgment task and a self-paced reading task. Our results support the claim that the access to the meaning of some as only some is context sensitive. Moreover, they also indicate that adjacency pair structure contributes to making that meaning rapidly available.
Highlights
IntroductionThe term conversational implicature was proposed by Grice (1975) to explain the meaning gap between logical meaning (i.e., the syntactically and semantically encoded meaning of a sentence) and the pragmatic meaning (i.e., the speaker meaning that is inferred in a particular communicative situation)
The acceptability mean for highly acceptable stimuli (HAS) was higher than that for highly unacceptable stimuli (HUS) (coeff = −5.08, SD = 0.018, than that for highly unacceptable stimuli (HUS)
A post-hoc Tukey test showed that this difference is significant (p < 0.0001)
Summary
The term conversational implicature was proposed by Grice (1975) to explain the meaning gap between logical meaning (i.e., the syntactically and semantically encoded meaning of a sentence) and the pragmatic meaning (i.e., the speaker meaning that is inferred in a particular communicative situation). B. John wants Mary to turn down the air conditioner or turn up the heat. On the one hand, (1) is a case of a particularized implicature (PCI) because contextual assumptions have a crucial role in sentence comprehension. In order to infer (1b), Mary needs to know if the air conditioner is high or the heat is low or if it is winter or summer. It could be the case that they were walking in the street and Mary had an extra sweater and John wants Mary to give it to him, or that the temperature
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