Are generalised scalar implicatures generated by default? An on-line investigation into the role of context in generating pragmatic inferences

Recent research in semantics and pragmatics has revived the debate about whether there are two cognitively distinct categories of conversational implicatures: generalised and particularised. Generalised conversational implicatures are so-called because they seem to arise more or less independently of contextual support. Particularised implicatures are more context-bound. The Default view is that generalised implicatures are default inferences and that their computation is relatively autonomous--being computed by some default mechanism and only being open to cancellation at a second stage when contextual assumptions are taken into consideration (i.a.). It is at that second stage where contextual assumptions are considered that particularised implications are computed. By contrast, Context-Driven theorists claim that both generalised and particularised implicatures are generated by the same process and only where there is contextual support (Chierchia, 2004; Horn, 1984; Levinson, 2000 i.a.). In this paper, we present three on-line studies of the prototypical cases of generalised implicatures: the scalar implicatures 'some of the Fs' > 'not all the Fs' and 'X or Y' > 'either X or Y but not both'. These studies were designed to test the context-dependence and autonomy of the implicatures. Our results suggest that these scalar implicatures are dependent on the conversational context and that they show none of the autonomy predicted by the Default view. We conclude with a discussion of the degree to which such implicatures are purely context-driven and whether an interactionist default position may also be plausible.     

Are children with Specific Language Impairment competent with the pragmatics and logic of quantification?

Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is understood to be a disorder that predominantly affects phonology, morphosyntax and/or lexical semantics. There is little conclusive evidence on whether children with SLI are challenged with regard to Gricean pragmatic maxims and on whether children with SLI are competent with the logical meaning of quantifying expressions. We use the comprehension of statements quantified with ‘all’, ‘none’, ‘some’, ‘some…not’, ‘most’ and ‘not all’ as a paradigm to study whether Spanish-speaking children with SLI are competent with the pragmatic maxim of informativeness, as well as with the logical meaning of these expressions.Children with SLI performed more poorly than a group of age-matched typically-developing peers, and both groups performed more poorly with pragmatics than with logical meaning. Moreover, children with SLI were disproportionately challenged by pragmatic meaning compared to their age-matched peers. However, the performance of children with SLI was comparable to that of a group of younger language-matched typically-developing children. The findings document that children with SLI do face difficulties with employing the maxim of informativeness, as well as with understanding the logical meaning of quantifiers, but also that these difficulties are in keeping with their overall language difficulties rather than exceeding them. The implications of these findings for SLI, linguistic theory, and clinical practice are discussed.     

Some effort for some: Further evidence that scalar implicatures are effortful

Under the assumption of the principle of cooperation (Grice, 1989), a statement such as “some eels are fish” is thought to be false since it contains less information than is considered sufficient. However, the statement is logically sound since the meaning of “some” is compatible with “all”. Currently, the primary interpretation of such underinformative statements remains subject to debate. According to Levinson (2000 Levinson, S. 2000. Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalised conversational implicature, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.  [Google Scholar]), the pragmatic “some but not all” interpretation is the default interpretation, while others (e.g., Sperber & Wilson, 1995) argue that this pragmatic interpretation only comes to the fore when relevant within the context and is thus considered secondary to the logical “some and perhaps all” interpretation. In this study, three factors that may influence the answer pattern are studied: task load, working memory capacity, and repetition of the statements. In Experiment 1, we used a secondary task paradigm to manipulate the cognitive load under which a number of underinformative statements had to be judged. We observed that for participants with a rather limited working memory span it is harder to reach a pragmatic interpretation under cognitive load. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the repetition of the statements. We observed that with a higher number of filler statements, participants produced fewer consistent answer patterns. This study provides further evidence against the automaticity of the pragmatic interpretation: It shows that the pragmatic interpretation requires more cognitive effort than the logical interpretation and that increasing the number of filler statements inhibits the development of a response strategy.     

Courage,cowardice, and Maher’s misstep

Could a Nazi soldier or terrorist be courageous? The Courage Problem asks us to answer this sort of question, and then to explain why people are reluctant to give this answer. The present paper sheds new light on the Courage Problem by examining a controversy sparked by Bill Maher, who claimed that the 9/11 terrorists’ acts were ‘not cowardly.’ It is shown that Maher’s controversy is fundamentally related to the Courage Problem. Then, a unified solution to both problems is provided. This solution entails that gutsy people who lack good ends are not courageous.     

Infelicitous Cancellation: The Explicit Cancellability Test for Conversational Implicature Revisited

This paper questions the adequacy of the explicit cancellability test for conversational implicature as it is commonly understood. The standard way of understanding this test relies on two assumptions: first, that that one can test whether a certain content is (merely) conversationally implicated, by checking whether that content is cancellable, and second, that a cancellation is successful only if it results in a felicitous utterance. While I accept the first of these assumptions, I reject the second one. I argue that a cancellation can succeed even if it results in an infelicitous utterance, and that unless we take this possibility into account we run the risk of misdiagnosing philosophically significant cases.     

Gricean Belief Change

One of the standard principles of rationality guiding traditional accounts of belief change is the principle of minimal change: a reasoner's belief corpus should be modified in a minimal fashion when assimilating new information. This rationality principle has stood belief change in good stead. However, it does not deal properly with all belief change scenarios. We introduce a novel account of belief change motivated by one of Grice's maxims of conversational implicature: the reasoner's belief corpus is modified in a minimal fashion to assimilate exactly the new information. In this form of belief change, when the reasoner revises by new information p ∨ q their belief corpus is modified so that p∨q is believed but stronger propositions like p∧q are not, no matter what beliefs are in the reasoner's initial corpus. We term this conservative belief change since the revised belief corpus is a conservative extension of the original belief corpus given the new information.     

Optimal assertions,and what they implicate. A uniform game theoretic approach

To determine what the speaker in a cooperative dialog meant with his assertion, on top of what he explicitly said, it is crucial that we assume that the assertion he gave was optimal. In determining optimal assertions we assume that dialogs are embedded in decision problems (van Rooij 2003) and use backwards induction for calculating them (Benz 2006). In this paper, we show that in terms of our framework we can account for several types of implicatures in a uniform way, suggesting that there is no need for an independent linguistic theory of generalized implicatures. In the final section, we show how we can embed our theory in the framework of signaling games, and how it relates with other game theoretic analyses of implicatures.