Cross-Linguistic Variation in the Meaning of Quantifiers: Implications for Pragmatic Enrichment

One of the most studied scales in the literature on scalar implicatures is the quantifier scale. While the truth of some is entailed by the truth of all, some is felicitous only when all is false. This opens the possibility that some would be felicitous if, e.g., almost all of the objects in the restriction of the quantifier have the property ascribed by the nuclear scope. This prediction from the standard theory of quantifier interpretation clashes with native speakers’ intuitions. In Experiment 1 we report a questionnaire study on the perception of quantifier meanings in English, French, Slovenian, and German which points to a cross-linguistic variation with respect to the perception of numerical bounds of the existential quantifier. In Experiment 2, using a picture choice task, we further examine whether the numerical bound differences correlate with differences in pragmatic interpretations of the quantifier some in English and quelques in French and interpret the results as supporting our hypothesis that some and its cross-linguistic counterparts are subjected to different processes of pragmatic enrichment

The case of scalar implicature processing

Implicatures like ‘Some politicians are smart’ (interpreted as ‘Some but not all politicians are smart’) are defined scalar implicatures. A heated linguistic debate has focused on how we derive those implicatures: some authors consider the computational process as linguistic in nature (Levinson, 2000), others as pragmatic in nature (Sperber & Wilson, 1995). A growing body of research, prompted by pioneering work by Bott and Noveck (2004), focused on the computational cost related with the computation of scalar implicatures. The present study addresses such topic through the use of different experimental techniques. With Experiment 1 (N = 57) we replicated the third experiment of Bott and Noveck (2004), the first study that identified a cost related to a pragmatic response. With Experiment 2 (N = 58), using a pseudo-word paradigm, we excluded the possibility that the computational cost is due to an experimental artifact, such as an increased difficulty in moving up in the conceptual hierarchy (e.g., ‘Some elephants are mammals’) than in moving down (e.g. ‘Some mammals are elephants’). In Experiment 3 (N = 54), with a Sentence Evaluation Task, we collected reading times, reaction times and eye gaze data. Results showed that the cost of the computation disappears when there is contextual support. Overall, our results seem to support the idea that scalar implicatures are not automatically computed with context playing an important role

Scalar Implicatures: The Psychological Reality of Scales

International audienceScalar implicatures, the phenomena where a sentence like "The pianist played some Mozart sonatas" is interpreted, as "The pianist did not play all Mozart sonatas" have been given two different analyses. Neo-Griceans (NG) claim that this interpretation is based on lexical scales (e.g., ), where the stronger term (e.g., all) implies the weaker term (e.g., some), but the weaker term (e.g., some) implicates the negation of the stronger term (i.e., some = not all). Post-Griceans (PG) deny that this is the case and offer a context-based inferential account for scalar implicatures. While scalar implicatures have been extensively investigated, with results apparently in favor of PG accounts, the psychological reality of lexical scales has not been put to the test. This is what we have done in the present experiment, with a lexical decision task using lexical scales in a masked priming paradigm. While PG accounts do not attribute any role for lexical scales in the computation of scalar implicatures, NG accounts suggest that lexical scales are the core mechanism behind the computation of scalar implicatures, and predict that weaker terms in a scale should prime stronger terms more than the reverse because stronger words are necessary to the interpretation of weaker words, while stronger words can be interpreted independently of weaker words. Our results provided evidence in favor of the psychological existence of scales, leading to the first clear experimental support for the NG account