Shared mechanism underlying unembedded and embedded enrichments: evidence from enrichment priming

Chao Sun,Richard Breheny

doi:10.21248/zaspil.61.2018.505

Abstract

In this paper, we use a priming paradigm to explore the mechanisms underlyingunembedded and embedded scalar enrichments. In particular, the aim is to see if localpragmatic enrichment could be a shared mechanism, involved in both. The two experimentspresented adopt Bott & Chemla's (2016) enrichment priming paradigm and test whetherunembedded and embedded enrichments could prime each other. The goal is to investigatewhether local pragmatic enrichment is indeed being accessed for the interpretation of theunembedded scalar and whether local enrichments, like other lexical semantic phenomena,are susceptible to priming.Keywords: pragmatics, scalar enrichments, priming.

Highlights

Scalar implicatures are widely discussed as potentially Gricean conversational implicatures. (1-2) are examples of scalar implicatures, where what follows '∼>' are implications that would follow in many imaginable situations: 1. Player A scored some of his shots. ∼> Player A did not score all of his shots
We found a main effect of priming (β = 1.84, SE = 0.62, p = .003)
The observed priming effect was mainly driven by the priming in the unembedded target condition

Summary

Introduction

Scalar implicatures are widely discussed as potentially Gricean conversational implicatures. 2. A: Alice was planning to cut the grass and wash the car. Many well-known proposals explain the implications in (1-2) broadly-speaking as Gricean conversational implicatures Gazdar, 1979; Geurts, 2010; Sauerland, 2004) On this kind of approach, an alternative for the assertion is inferred to be not true on the basis of reasoning about the speaker’s intentions. A widely discussed limitation of this approach is that it cannot explain certain so-called ‘embedded scalar enrichments’ (Chierchia, 2004; Chierchia, Fox, and Spector, 2012; Potts et al, 2016). An example of an embedded enrichment is given in (3) – taken from Potts et al (2016): 3. Exactly one player hit some of his shots ∼> Exactly one player hit some and not all of his shots

Methods

Results

Conclusion