Abstract
In their recent paper, Geurts and van Tiel (2013) review a range of evidence on the availability of embedded scalar enrichments (upper-bound construals, or UBCs). They argue that these readings are not readily available, except when triggered by contrast effects, and conclude that the experimental data do not support a conventionalist view of implicature. They also consider how some of these data can be analysed as exhibiting typicality effects. In this commentary, I focus on the claim that typicality effects apply to quantifiers, and consider some of its implications for our view of semantics and pragmatics. In particular, I look at whether these effects are general to embedded and non-embedded contexts, whether and how typicality relates to truth-conditional narrowing, and the implications of this view for the nature of pragmatic enrichment. I conclude that typicality effects are indeed in evidence in the data elicited so far, and that this opens up several promising new avenues for the study of quantification in natural language, as well as challenging our interpretation of existing data. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.7.8 BibTeX info
Highlights
A flurry of recent experimental research has addressed the vexed question of so-called “embedded implicatures,” or local upper-bound construals (UBCs): cases where the pragmatic enrichment of a weak scalar term seems to take place locally, under the scope of an operator
Geurts & van Tiel (2013) review three experimental papers on this topic: Geurts & Pouscoulous 2009, which argued that embedded UBCs are very infrequently in evidence, and Clifton & Dube 2010 and Chemla & Spector 2011, which argued that embedded UBCs are relatively widespread in a way that suggests the inadequacy of a Gricean pragmatic account
Geurts & van Tiel criticise these latter two papers on two distinct grounds. They argue that the materials used give rise to contrast effects, which suggests that the results can be parsimoniously accounted for on pragmatic grounds after all; and secondly, they argue that the results can be even better accounted for in terms of typicality
Summary
A flurry of recent experimental research has addressed the vexed question of so-called “embedded implicatures,” or local upper-bound construals (UBCs): cases where the pragmatic enrichment of a weak scalar term seems to take place locally, under the scope of an operator. Geurts & van Tiel’s argument with respect to the recent experimental data travels some distance over the course of the paper They first set out to establish that embedded UBCs are compatible with all the currently competing theoretical proposals, and describe how contrast effects could be invoked as part of an explanation for the findings of both Clifton & Dube 2010 and Chemla & Spector 2011. Geurts & van Tiel (2013) articulate what I think is a more constructive objection to the authors’ analyses of their respective data sets, by demonstrating that the results can be modelled by appeal to typicality This account handles the data that arises from other non-critical conditions of Chemla & Spector’s experiment: it provides an explanation for how one clearly false sentence comes to be rated as more “appropriate” (presumably not “true”) than another. Taken together with this work, Geurts & van Tiel’s (2013) analysis suggests that we may need to exercise considerable caution in interpreting apparent preferences for UBCs as evidence for implicature in any technically defensible sense of the word
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