A closer look at strengthened readings of scalars

Abstract

The majority of the extensive experimental and theoretical literature on scalar strengthening assumes that the phenomenon is uniform across all types of scalars. The experiment reported here contributes to the growing evidence against scalar uniformity, while also exploring the suggestion of Van Tiel, Van Miltenburg, Zevakhina, and Guerts, (2014) of the role of boundedness in the observed variation. The current experiment utilizes a novel approach to exploring the interpretation of scalars, and also investigates the content of strengthened interpretations.

Keywords

Language comprehension scalar implicatures experimental pragmatics sentence processing

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Baayen

R. H.

(2008). Analyzing linguistic data: A practical introduction to statistics using R. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Barr

D. J.

Levy

Scheepers

Tily

H. J.

(2013). Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language, 68, 255–278.

Bates

D. M.

Maechler

Bolker

(2013). lme4: Linear mixed-effects models using s4 classes (R Package Version). Retrieved from http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=lme4

Beltrama

Xiang

(2012). Is good better than excellent? An experimental investigation of scalar implicatures and gradable adjectives. In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, 17, 81–98. Available at: http://semanticsarchive.net/sub2012/

Chierchia

Fox

Spector

(2012). The grammatical view of scalar implicatures and the relationship between semantics and pragmatics. In Maienborn

von Heusinger

Portner

(Eds.), Semantics: An international handbook of natural language meaning (pp. 2297–2331). Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter.

Degen

(2015). Investigating the distribution of some (but not all) implicatures using corpora and web-based methods. Semantics and Pragmatics, 8, 1–55.

Doran

Baker

R. E.

McNabb

Larson

Ward

(2009). On the non-unified nature of scalar implicature: An empirical investigation. International Review of Pragmatics, 1, 211–248.

Fox

(2007). Free choice and the theory of scalar implicatures. In Sauerland

Stateva

(Eds.), Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics (pp. 71–120). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gazdar

(1979). Pragmatics: Implicature, presupposition, and logical form. New York, NY: Academic Press.

10.

Geurts

(2009). Scalar implicature and local pragmatics. Mind and Language 24, 51–79. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0017.2008.01353.x.

11.

Geurts

(2010). Quantity implicatures. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

12.

Geurts

Pouscoulos

(2009). Embedded implicatures?!? Semantics and Pragmatics, 2(4), 1–24.

13.

Grice

H. P.

(1975). Logic and conversation. In Cole

Morgan

(Eds.), Syntax and Semantics 3: speech acts. London: Academic Press.

14.

Horn

L. R. A.

(1972). On the semantic properties of the logical operators in English (Doctoral dissertation). University of California at Los Angeles.

15.

Horn

L. R. A.

(1989). Natural history of negation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

16.

Katzir

(2007). Structurally-defined alternatives. Linguistics and Philosophy, 30, 669–690. doi:10.1007/s10988-008-9029-y

17.

Pouscoulous

(2006). Processing scalar inferences (Doctoral dissertation). EHESS, Paris.

18.

R Development Core Team. (2013). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Available from http://www.R-project.org

19.

Van Tiel

Van Miltenburg

Zevakhina

Geurts

. (2014). Scalar diversity. Journal of Semantics, 33, 107–135. doi:10.1093/jos/ffu017

20.

Zevakhina

(2012). Strength and Similarity of Scalar Alternatives. In Guevara

A. Aguilar

Chernilovskaya

Nouwen

(Eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Beedeutung (MIT Working Papers in Linguistics), 16, 647–658.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.05 MB