Experimental Evidence for Embedded Scalar Implicatures

Experimental Evidence for Embedded Scalar Implicatures

Scalar implicatures are traditionally viewed as pragmatic inferences which result from a reasoning about speakers’ communicative intentions (Grice 1989). This view has been challenged in recent years by theories which propose that scalar implicatures are a grammatical phenomenon. Such theories claim that scalar implicatures can be computed in embedded positions and enter into the recursive comp...

Scalar implicatures of embedded disjunction∗

Sentences with disjunction in the scope of a universal quantifier, Every A is P or Q, tend to give rise to distributive inferences that each of the disjuncts holds of at least one individual in the domain of the quantifier, Some A is P & Some A is Q. These inferences are standardly derived as an entailment of the meaning of the sentence together with the scalar implicature that it is not the ca...

Experimental results on embedded implicatures

This handout reviews recent experimental results concerning the prevalence of embedded scalar implicatures. The focus is on Geurts and Pouscoulous 2009 (henceforth GP09), which argues that these implicatures are marginal at best, and Chemla and Spector 2011 (CS11), which argues that they are robust. I also include brief summaries of the three commentaries on GP09 that appeared in 2010 in Semant...

Involvement of prefrontal cortex in scalar implicatures: evidence from magnetoencephalography

The present study investigated the neural correlates of the realisation of scalar inferences, i.e., the interpretation of some as meaning some but not all. We used magnetoencephalography, which has high temporal resolution, to measure neural activity while participants heard stories that included the scalar inference trigger some in contexts that either provide strong cues for a scalar inferenc...

Scalar implicatures in language acquisition: Some evidence from Modern Greek