Abstract
In the current paper, we employ a novel Shadow Play Paradigm in order to test Romanian monolingual adults’ sensitivity to truth and informativeness and investigate their ability to derive implicatures with epistemic adverbs. We show that implicature rates with epistemic adverbs are higher when participants are asked to reward characters depending on the truth of their statements rather than on whether what they say is the best description of the situation. Given participants’ task-sensitivity, we recommend instructions using optimality criteria as a more sensitive method of probing into implicature generation.
Highlights
Experimental paradigms that study pragmatic reasoning by either testing the fit of sentences to situations or the fit of situations to sentences can be divided into two broad groups: They either ask subjects to make judgements about truth and falsity, or they ask them to make judgements about some measure of appropriateness
We argue that paradigms employing judgements about truth and falsity activate reasoning about semantic meaning, while judgments about appropriateness activate reasoning about pragmatic meaning. We consider this hypothesis in the context of a case study that investigates the derivation of scalar implicatures with the epistemic adverb poate ‘maybe’ in Romanian in the case of Romanian monolingual adults by means of a novel Shadow Play Paradigm
Our experiments show that implicature rates with the epistemic adverb poate ‘maybe’ are significantly higher in the case of the optimality judgment task (Best Description Task) than in the Truth Value Judgment Task (Right-Wrong Task), emphasizing an important methodological point: that results and, the theory accounting for them are largely dependent upon the methods used
Summary
Experimental paradigms that study pragmatic reasoning by either testing the fit of sentences to situations or the fit of situations to sentences can be divided into two broad groups: They either ask subjects to make judgements about truth and falsity, or they ask them to make judgements about some measure of appropriateness. We argue that paradigms employing judgements about truth and falsity activate reasoning about semantic meaning, while judgments about appropriateness activate reasoning about pragmatic meaning. We consider this hypothesis in the context of a case study that investigates the derivation of scalar implicatures with the epistemic adverb poate ‘maybe’ in Romanian in the case of Romanian monolingual adults by means of a novel Shadow Play Paradigm. Our experiments show that implicature rates with the epistemic adverb poate ‘maybe’ are significantly higher in the case of the optimality judgment task (Best Description Task) than in the Truth Value Judgment Task (Right-Wrong Task), emphasizing an important methodological point: that results and, the theory accounting for them are largely dependent upon the methods used.
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