The role of relevance for scalar diversity: a usage-based approach

Elizabeth Pankratz,Bob Van Tiel

doi:10.1017/langcog.2021.13

Abstract

abstractScalar inferences occur when a weaker statement like It’s warm is used when a stronger one like It’s hot could have been used instead, resulting in the inference that whoever produced the weaker statement believes that the stronger statement does not hold. The rate at which this inference is drawn varies across scalar words, a result termed ‘scalar diversity’. Here, we study scalar diversity in adjectival scalar words from a usage-based perspective. We introduce novel operationalisations of several previously observed predictors of scalar diversity using computational tools based on usage data, allowing us to move away from existing judgment-based methods. In addition, we show in two experiments that, above and beyond these previously observed predictors, scalar diversity is predicted in part by the relevance of the scalar inference at hand. We introduce a corpus-based measure of relevance based on the idea that scalar inferences that are more relevant are more likely to occur in scalar constructions that draw an explicit contrast between scalar words (e.g., It’s warm but not hot). We conclude that usage has an important role to play in the establishment of common ground, a requirement for pragmatic inferencing.

Highlights

Imagine that, on a sunny summer day, you go with some friends to the beach
To describe scalar inference (SI), it is often assumed that words like warm are associated with lexical scales consisting of words that are ordered in terms of logical strength, e.g., the scale written as ⟨warm, hot⟩
We test its role in shaping scalar diversity, and we show in two experiments that relevance is a strong predictor of SI rate on top of the factors of semantic distance, polarity, boundedness, and extremeness tested by Gotzner et al (2018)

Summary

Introduction

On a sunny summer day, you go with some friends to the beach. You want to take your sandals off and walk barefoot, but you do not want to burn your feet if the sand is hot, so you ask your friend who has gone ahead: “How’s the sand?” “It’s warm”, they say. You understand them to mean that the sand is only warm, not hot, so you take off your sandals This reasoning follows from the alternative answer your friend could have given – “It’s hot” – using an informationally stronger alterative to warm. Because they chose not to use this alternative, and because you assume that your friend is cooperative, you reason that their not using the alternative means that they intend to express that it does not hold and, that the sand is warm but not hot (e.g., Geurts, 2010; Grice, 1989; Horn, 1972; Matsumoto, 1995). Given a lexical scale of the form ⟨α, β⟩, uttering a sentence containing α in an unembedded position may imply that the corresponding sentence with β is false

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