Complex inferential processes are needed for implicature comprehension, but not for implicature production

Upon hearing “Some of Michelangelo’s sculptures are in Rome”, adults can easily generate a scalar implicature and infer that the intended meaning of the utterance corresponds to “Some but not all Michelangelo’s sculptures are in Rome”. Comprehension experiments show that preschoolers struggle with this kind of inference until at least five years of age. Surprisingly, the few studies having investigated children’s production of scalar expressions like 'some' and 'all' suggest that production is adult-like already in their third year of life. Thus, children’s production of implicatures seems to develop at least two years before their comprehension of implicatures. In this paper, we present a novel account of scalar implicature generation in the framework of Bidirectional Optimality Theory: the Asymmetry Account. We show that the production-comprehension asymmetry is predicted to emerge because the comprehension of 'some' requires the hearer to consider the speaker’s perspective, but the production of 'some' does not require the speaker to consider the hearer’s perspective. Hence, children’s comprehension of scalar expressions, but not their production of scalar expressions, is predicted to be related to their theory of mind development. Not possessing fully developed theory of mind abilities yet, children thus have difficulty in comprehending scalar expressions such as 'some' in an adult-like way. Our account also explains why variable performance is found in experimental studies testing children’s ability to generate scalar implicatures; moreover, it describes the differences between children’s and adults’ implicature generation in terms of their ability to recursively apply theory of mind; finally, it sheds new light on the question why the interpretation of numerals does not require implicatures generation

Pragmatic markedness and syntax

Wetensch. publicati

Definiteness across languages

Definiteness has been a central topic in theoretical semantics since its modern foundation. However, despite its significance, there has been surprisingly scarce research on its cross-linguistic expression. With the purpose of contributing to filling this gap, the present volume gathers thirteen studies exploiting insights from formal semantics and syntax, typological and language specific studies, and, crucially, semantic fieldwork and cross-linguistic semantics, in order to address the expression and interpretation of definiteness in a diverse group of languages, most of them understudied. The papers presented in this volume aim to establish a dialogue between theory and data in order to answer the following questions: What formal strategies do natural languages employ to encode definiteness? What are the possible meanings associated to this notion across languages? Are there different types of definite reference? Which other functions (besides marking definite reference) are associated with definite descriptions? Each of the papers contained in this volume addresses at least one of these questions and, in doing so, they aim to enrich our understanding of definiteness