Scalar Implicatures Research Articles

“Yixie” is likely not created equal for everyone: Distinct reasoning procedures in interpreting the same scalar quantifier

The present study examines the reasoning procedures involved in interpreting the scalar quantifier yixie (‘some’) in Mandarin Chinese via a mouse-tracking technique. Results showed that the aggregate mouse movement in accessing the pragmatic interpretation involved an extra step compared with that in accessing the logical interpretation. However, on the individual-trial level, participants differed significantly in their reasoning procedures. Some of the participants who consistently preferred the logical interpretation followed one-step processes; for those who consistently preferred the pragmatic interpretation, some of them followed two-step processes and some others followed one-step processes. These findings provided evidence for both the contextualist models and defaultist models, but raised concern over the constraint-based accounts. The distinct reasoning processes among the participants may reflect their different views on the nature of scalar implicatures, even for the same scalar quantifier. This extends the observation of scalar diversity to the level of language users. Not only are scalar implicatures from various scales accessed at different rates, but also the scalar implicature for the same scalar term may be represented with distinct status among language users.

Conversational Implicature in Selected Songs Lyrics by Brandi Carlile

Implicature is generally communicated through various media, such as song lyrics. The purpose of this research is to give comprehending to the readers and is expected to add their insight into implied meanings, especially the conversational implicature in song lyrics, so they can easily capture the true meaning that the lyricist poured into the song. The researcher analyzed conversational implicature using theory of implicature proposed by Yule (1996). The analysis in this research used qualitative research method by choosing the lyrics that contain conversational implicature. To support the analysis, the researcher used books, thesis, journals, and social media such as google and YouTube. The results of this research indicate that there are three types of conversational implicature, namely general conversational implicature, particularized conversational implicature, and scalar implicature. Then, the most dominant type of conversational implicature found in Brandi Carlile’s songs lyrics is particularized conversational implicature. Based on the result of analysis, conversational implicature is a common phenomenon in literary works, especially song lyrics.

Scalar Implicature is Sensitive to Contextual Alternatives.

The quantifier "some" often elicits a scalar implicature during comprehension: "Some of today's letters have checks inside" is often interpreted to mean that not all of today's letters have checks inside. In previous work, Goodman and Stuhlmüller (G&S) proposed a model that predicts that this implicature should depend on the speaker's knowledgeability: If the speaker has only examined some of the available letters (e.g., two of three letters), people are less likely to infer that "some" implies "not all" than if the speaker has examined all of the available letters. G&S also provided behavioral evidence in support of their model. In this paper, we first show that a simple extension of G&S's model (1) predicts G&S's knowledgeability effects, and in addition, (2) predicts that the knowledgeability effect will be reduced when the speaker's usage indicates numeral alternatives are available. We tested the new model's predictions in four preregistered experiments. All experiments supported the first model prediction, replicating G&S's finding of a main effect of the speaker's knowledge. Further, Experiments 2 and 4 supported the second model prediction showing that the words that a speaker tends to use affect the strength of scalar implicature that comprehenders make. In particular, when the speaker has partial knowledge (e.g., has only examined two of three letters), comprehenders think that "some" is more likely to mean "not all" when the speaker also tends to produce number words in similar sentences (e.g., "2 of today's rooms have working smoke detectors."). These results have important ramifications for theories of meaning: the context beyond the sentence (e.g., the speaker's tendency to use particular words) affects the set of alternatives that comprehenders consider when inferring meaning.

Investigating a shared mechanism in the priming of manner and quantity implicature

In the current paper, we investigate the existence of a shared derivation mechanism between manner and quantity implicature. As per the Gricean-inspired perspective, both manner and quantity implicature are derived in a substantially analogous fashion, relying on the consideration of alternative ways in which the speaker could have spoken, but didn’t. In contrast, other accounts (e.g., grammatical accounts) of quantity implicature consider manner implicature and quantity implicature to be distinct in their derivational mechanisms.Previous studies have found that quantity implicature can prime the derivation of subsequent quantity implicature both within and between quantity implicature subtypes in a structural priming paradigm, suggesting that ad hoc, numeral and some quantity implicature are governed by the same derivational mechanism. We have applied a structural priming paradigm to the case of manner implicature to investigate 1) whether manner implicature can be primed, 2) whether manner implicature can prime manner implicature and 3) whether manner implicature can be primed by quantity implicature. Through manner-manner priming, the paper addresses the psycholinguistic reality of manner. While quantity-manner priming probes the existence of a shared derivational mechanism between the phenomena.We show that manner implicature can prime manner implicature under certain experimental circumstances and that ad hoc quantity, but not some quantity implicature can also prime manner implicature, whereas some quantity implicature cannot.

On the interpretation of German <em>einige</em>. The effect of tense and cardinality

We present a study investigating the effect of tense (past vs. future) on the computation of scalar implicatures in connection with the German quantifier einige ‘some’ in an interactive experiment, which included a financial incentive for participants to consider whether another speaker would share their judgment. We tested the hypothesis that scalar implicatures are less frequently drawn in future tense than in past tense. In addition, we studied to what extent sets with various cardinalities are prototypical representatives of einige + N. We hypothesized that larger cardinalities are more prototypical representatives of the quantifier einige than smaller cardinalities (relative to the cardinality of the total set). We analyzed the experimental data with probabilistic Bayesian models with a linking hypothesis between participants’ responses and readings based on utility maximization in simple decision problems. In line with the hypotheses, we found that less scalar implicatures are drawn in future tense than in past tense, which replicates the results of previous research on English some, and that with an increase in set size acceptance of statements involving einige also increases.

Tracking the activation of scalar alternatives with semantic priming

From an utterance of Mary ate some of the deep dish, hearers frequently infer that Mary didn’t eat all of the deep dish. Similarly, an utterance of The movie is good might lead hearers to conclude that the movie isn’t excellent. These inferences are instances of scalar implicature (SI). The standard assumption is that SI arises via hearers’ reasoning about alternative utterances that the speaker could have said, but did not. In particular, hearers are taken to consider stronger alternatives such as all (or Mary ate all of the deep dish) and excellent (or The movie is excellent) and derive their negation. In this study, we investigate the psycholinguistic reflexes of this inferential process. We use semantic priming with lexical decision to test whether lexical alternatives such as all and excellent are retrieved and activated in the processing of SI-triggering sentences. The results of our experiments indeed suggest that alternatives play a role in the processing of SI, though a number of empirical puzzles remain.

The investigation of quantity implicatures during typical development: a systematic review

The present work is a systematic review on the acquisition of quantity implicatures in typically developing children. The references were selected through the PRISMA method. The criteria for eligibility were that the articles should be peer-reviewed, published articles written in English, containing empirical data on the comprehension of quantity implicatures in first language acquisition during typical development. The aim of this review is three-fold. First, to provide a picture of what empirical data tells us about the acquisition of quantity implicatures, based on both lexical and ad-hoc scales, potentially contributing to theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. Second, to analyze the methodologies that have been used to test children and their adequacy. And lastly to evaluate whether or not systematic review is an accurate analysis method for this type of varied and often complicated data. The results suggest that children improve in implicature derivation with age, especially with lexical scales, and that action-based tasks not based on meta-linguistic evaluations might be better suited to test these inferences, especially as opposed to Truth Value Judgment tasks. The fact that the systematic analysis confirms previously individuated trends in the acquisition of implicatures confirms that this is in fact a useful methodology to analyze the data, even with its limitations.

Neg-raising with belief predicates as a scaleless implicature

I give a new account of neg-raising with belief predicates as scaleless implicatures, inferences that are predicted by grammatical theories of scalar implicatures, when a quantifier projects subdomain alternatives but no scalar alternative. I argue that the neg-raising inference should be treated as an implicature because of parallels observed in its distribution and that of other known cases of implicatures (namely typical scalar implicatures, free choice effects, and other reported cases of scaleless implicatures). Furthermore, the scaleless implicature account of neg-raising is preferred over the previously proposed analysis by Romoli (2013) of neg-raising as a scalar implicature, because Romoli has to make the ad hoc assumption that 'think' has an excluded middle alternative, while in this new account, the lack of a scalar alternative is predicted by its absence in the lexicon of English, and the presence of subdomain alternatives for quantifiers has been assumed in a variety of other work.

Restrictions on the position of exh

The grammatical approach to scalar implicatures attributes their introduction to a covert operator exh, which can be posited in various structural positions. By studying the interaction of scalar implicature calculation and the presuppositions of English also and again, we are able to pinpoint the structural position of exh. This diagnostic shows that some triggers of scalar implicature require exh to be adjoined as low as possible above them, whereas other triggers allow for more delayed adjunction of exh. We offer a concrete proposal for these behaviors in terms of syntactic feature-checking and show how it extends to cases involving ignorance inferences.

Incremental pragmatic interpretation of gradable adjectives: The role of standards of comparison

While for relative gradable adjectives the value on the underlying measurement scale that serves as a standard of comparison is contextually determined, for absolute gradable adjectives this is typically taken to be a fixed, context-invariant value (Rotstein & Winter 2004; Kennedy & McNally 2005). The present study investigates how lexical-semantic factors, such as the type of standard of comparison invoked by gradable adjectives, affect the incremental computation of scalar implicatures triggered by such adjectives. Our study shows that the incremental computation of scalar implicatures is facilitated by the immediate visual context but only for relative adjectives. Minimum standard absolute adjectives, which impose a lower bound on their corresponding measurement scales, robustly trigger upper-bounded interpretations independently of the availability of contrastive visual information. Our findings indicate that different kinds of scalar meaning are computed incrementally and potentially in parallel. Overall, these findings shed new light on theories of scalar implicatures and highlight the need for a model of adjective meaning that incorporates semantic and pragmatic factors (see also Gotzner 2021; and for related ideas in the domain of quantifiers see Franke & Bergen 2020 and Cremers, Wilcox & Spector 2022, and Magri (2017) for Hirschberg scales).

The Realization of Conversational Implicatures in Listening Comprehension of ‘Longman Preparation Course for the TOEFL Test’

Studying implicatures cannot be separated from studying pragmatics. Studying pragmatics is studying meaning in context. Understanding meaning in context is very essential in communication. The purpose of the study was to explain the realization of idiosyncratic and formulaic conversational implicatures in listening comprehension section of ‘LONGMAN Preparation Course for the TOEFL Test’. Qualitative research is used to collect data, analyze the data, and take a conclusion based on the analysis of the findings. The type of qualitative study used is content analysis. In a TOEFL book titled LONGMAN Preparation Course for the TOEFL Test, data were implicatures in every conversation covered in the script of the short conversation of listening comprehension section. The researcher found that the four types of idiosyncratic implicature were all in the short conversations of listening comprehension section in the TOEFL book "LONGMAN Preparation Course for the TOEFL Test.” Meanwhile, formulaic implicature that could be found were idiomatic, scalar, sequential, and indirect criticism implicature. However, the other formulaic implicature such as pope-Q and MRR (Minimum Requirement Rule) could not be found. Finally, it is expected that the result of this research can provide scientific information about formulaic and idiosyncratic conversational implicature theory and practically improve students' awareness of formulaic and idiosyncratic implicature. It is also expected that it can help the students to do the listening comprehension section in every TOEFL test. Then, the results of this research can pedagogically be used to understand English better in its actual use and help learners better understand formulaic and idiosyncratic implicature.

Predicting Scalar Implicature Interpretations From Lexical Knowledge.

We measure typically developing monolingual child Spanish speakers' lexical development with a range of standard expressive and receptive tests. We also measure their comprehension of sentences with the existential quantifier algunos "some" to determine their abilities to generate "some, but not all" scalar implicatures or pragmatically enriched quantifier interpretations. We then determine the degree to which lexical development predicts implicature interpretations. We fit regression models with lexical measures as predictor variables and implicature interpretations as the outcome variable. We then divide the child sample into implicature generators (50/61) and implicature nongenerators (11/61) and test the usefulness of the four lexical measures in a linear discriminant function analysis to separate children into these two categories. Results show significant correlations between each lexical measure and the outcome variable and, in a regression, that three of four lexical measures account for unique variance. Furthermore, the linear discriminant function analysis separates children into implicature nongenerators with 100% accuracy (11/11) and implicature generators with 88% accuracy (44/50). The Quantity Scale, or set of quantity-expressing determiners, proposed by Horn and Grice, develops as a function of the links among its quantifiers. We speculate that children's lexicons refract approximate number system representations in language- and morpheme-specific ways. These quantified noun phrases (NPs) are then merged into sentences interpreted pragmatically with conversationally computed implicatures, using higher order reasoning.

Isn’t there more than one way to bias a polar question?

I show that speaker bias in polarity focus questions (PFQs) is context sensitive, while speaker bias in high negation questions (HNQs) is context insensitive. This leads me to develop separate accounts of speaker bias in each of these kinds of polar questions. I argue that PFQ bias derives from the fact that they are frequently used in conversational contexts in which an answer to the question has already been asserted by an interlocutor, thus expressing doubt about the prior assertion. This derivation explains their context sensitivity, and the fact that similar bias arises from polar questions that lack polarity focus. I also provide novel evidence that the prejacents of HNQs lack negation, and thus only have an outer negation reading (see, e.g., Ladd in Papers from the seventeenth regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, vol. 17, pp. 164–171, 1981; Romero and Han in Linguistics and Philosophy 27(5):609–658, 2004; Krifka in Contrastiveness in information structure, alternatives and scalar implicatures, pp. 359–398, 2017; AnderBois in Questions in discourse, pp. 118–171, 2019; Frana and Rawlins in Semantics and Pragmatics 12(16):1–48, 2019; Jeong in Journal of Semantics 38(1):49–94, 2020). Based on a treatment of HNQs as denoting unbalanced partitions (Romero and Han in Linguistics and Philosophy 27(5):609–658, 2004), and competition with their positive polar question alternatives, I propose a novel derivation of speaker bias in HNQs as a conversational implicature. Roughly, if the speaker is ignorant, then a positive polar question will be more useful because it is more informative, so the use of an HNQ conveys that the speaker is not ignorant. The denotation of the HNQ then makes clear which way the speaker is biased. The result separates high negation from verum focus, and I argue that it is more parsimonious and has better empirical coverage than prior accounts.

Scalar implicatures in adult L2 learners: A self-paced reading study

Using self-paced reading, the present study compared native English and adult L1-Korean–L2-English speakers’ processing behaviors during online comprehension of underinformative scalar sentences and non-scalar sentences like Some/All elephants have trunks and ears. Results indicate that native speakers showed online sensitivity (i.e. slower reading) to underinformative scalar sentences relative to non-scalar sentences, but second language (L2) speakers did not. These results are interpreted in support of the Relevance Theory claim that scalar implicature generation is modulated by contextual and individual factors, in particular by the language condition, that is, whether sentences are presented in L1-English versus L2-English.

Pragmatic inferences: Neuroimaging of ad-hoc implicatures

During conversation, comprehenders often make pragmatic inferences, or implicatures. Our study concerns ad-hoc implicatures, which are quantity-based implicatures. For example, the sentence “I walked Lassie”, where the addressee knows that the speaker has 2 dogs, signals to the addressee that the speaker wanted to convey an enriched meaning (i.e., she walked Lassie, but not the other dog). On some accounts, it is assumed that these implicatures are derived similarly to the well-studied scalar implicatures. Yet, ad-hoc implicatures received little attention. In the current study, we used fMRI to further uncover the mechanisms that support pragmatic inferences, and specifically ad-hoc implicatures. In our judgment task, we first presented a context picture with several objects, then the target sentence (sans picture) which referred to either the subset (implicature condition) or the whole set of objects (no-implicature condition), and finally asked participants to judge whether a final picture matched the target sentence. Comparing the implicature and no-implicature conditions, we observed activations in the rostrolateral prefrontal cortex, which we linked to inference generation, and in the right inferior parietal lobule, which we linked to theory of mind or attention shift. We also performed an ROI analysis, examining activations related to ad-hoc implicatures in regions previously linked to scalar implicatures and to other types of context-based implicatures, showing overlaps and dissimilarities in both cases. Thus, our results are not completely in line with theories that argue for one type of processing in the derivation of pragmatic inferences. • Highlights for “Pragmatic inferences: Neuroimaging of ad-hoc implicatures”. • The neural correlates of ad-hoc implicatures have not been examined. • Activation in the rlPFC was linked to inference generation. • Activation in the right iPL was linked to mind reading or attention shift. • ROI analysis showed Overlap and dissimilarity with other pragmatic inferences.

Sources of cognitive cost in scalar implicature processing: A review

Research in Experimental Pragmatics has shown that deriving scalar implicatures involves effort and processing costs. This finding was robust and replicated across a wide variety of testing techniques, logical terms, populations, and languages. However, a question that remains disputed in the literature is whether this observed processing cost is a product of the inferential process itself or other logical properties whose computation taxes cognitive resources independently of the inferential mechanism. This paper has two objectives: one is to review the previous experimental work on scalar implicatures and how it evolved in the literature, and the other is to discuss possible factors that render computing scalar implicatures cognitively effortful. Implications and directions for future research are provided.

The role of Alternatives in the interpretation of scalars and numbers: Insights Insights from the inference task

Numerical noun phrases (NNPs) are ambiguous between at least two and exactly two interpretations. This ambiguity has been commonly discussed as a case of Scalar Implicature (SI), where meaning is enriched by exclusion of an alternative. But the SI approach to NNPs has also been widely challenged. We tested NNPs and scalar expressions in inference tasks and found that scalars were sensitive to a manipulation that altered the relevance of alternatives, whereas exactly readings for NNPs were not. Our findings provide a theory-critical challenge to the SI view of NNPs and support alternative views. EARLY ACCESS

Complexity vs. salience of alternatives in implicature: A cross-linguistic investigation

Scalar implicature depends on the activation of alternatives. For instance, in English, finger implicates 'not thumb', suggesting that thumb is an activated alternative. Is this because it is more specific (Quantity) and equally short (Manner)? Indeed, toe doesn't imply 'not big toe', perhaps because big toe is longer. As L. Horn points out, this Quantity/Manner explanation predicts that if English had the simplex Latin word pollex meaning 'thumb or big toe', then the asymmetry would disappear. But would it suffice for that word to exist in the language, or would the word also have to be sufficiently salient? We explore this question in four languages that are sometimes said to lack a single-word alternative for thumb: Spanish (which does have pulgar 'thumb or big toe' (< pollex), though it is a non-colloquial form), Russian, Persian, and Arabic. To gauge the salience of various ways of describing digits, we use a fill-in-the-blank production task. We then measure the availability of implicatures using a forced choice comprehension task. We find cross-linguistic differences in implicature, and moreover that implicature calculation tracks production probabilities more closely than structural complexity of the alternatives. A comparison between two Rational Speech Act models—one in which the speaker replicates our production data and a standard one in which the speaker chooses based on a standard cost/accuracy trade-off—shows that comprehension is more closely tied to production probability than to the complexity of alternatives. 

Preschoolers’ comprehension of exhaustive focus: The role of contextualization

Previous research has uncovered that, despite the omnipresence of focus in utterances, children typically do not compute the exhaustivity inference associated with cleft(-like) syntactic focus constructions at adult-like levels before 7 years of age. Children’s comparable limitations with lexically triggered scalar implicatures, inferences with an essentially identical logical structure, have been argued to stem not from the lack of their competence to compute the implicature itself, but from their immature contextualization abilities to identify relevant scalar alternatives. We address the question whether the same extraneous factor may underlie preschooler’s difficulties with focus exhaustification in a comprehension study of 5- to 6-year-old Hungarian children which investigated the effect of contextual cues on their focus interpretation. It was found that while the presence of an explicit Question Under Discussion significantly raises children’s accuracy in identifying the focus and its alternatives (sub-experiment 1), it fails to induce a similar increase in the proportion of exhaustive interpretations (sub-experiment 2). These results indicate that, in contrast to the case of scalar implicatures, children’s low rate of exhaustification of focus reflects a deeper, less context-dependent difference from adult-like comprehension, possibly rooted in the linguistic representation of focus exhaustivity.

Effects of Processing Limits on Computing Scalar Implicatures: Evidence from Child English and Child Mandarin

ABSTRACT Relatively late mastery of scalar implicatures has been suggested to correlate with children’s immature processing capacities, such as their limited working memory. Yet, many studies that tested for a link between children’s working memory and their computation of scalar implicatures have failed to find any correlation. One possible reason is that the children in these studies showed little individual variation in computing scalar implicatures. The present study therefore tested for an effect of working memory in younger children, who still clearly displayed difficulties with scalar implicatures and showed greater individual variation. Subjects were 4- to 7-year-old children acquiring either English or Mandarin Chinese. A covered-box task was used to investigate the computation of scalar implicatures associated with ‘some’. A digit span task was used to measure their working memory. Neither the Mandarin-speaking children nor the English-speaking children computed scalar implicatures at an adult-like level. Moreover, a significant correlation was observed between children’s computation of scalar implicatures and their digit spans. These results have provided new support for a processing approach to the observed late mastery of scalar implicatures.