Universal Implicatures and Free Choice Effects: Experimental Data

Universal inferences like (i) have been taken as evidence for a local/syntactic treatment of scalar implicatures (i.e. theories where the enrichment of "some" into "some but not all" can happen sub-sententially): (i) Everybody read some of the books --> Everybody read [some but not all the books]. In this paper, I provide experimental evidence which casts doubt on this argument. The counter-argument relies on a new set of data involving free choice inferences (a sub-species of scalar implicatures) and negative counterparts of (i), namely sentences with the quantifier "no" instead of "every". The results show that the globalist account of scalar implicatures is incomplete (mainly because of free choice inferences) but that the distribution of universal inferences made available by the localist move remains incomplete as well (mainly because of the negative cases). doi:10.3765/sp.2.2 BibTeX info

[1]  S. S. Stevens.  The direct estimation of sensory magnitudes-loudness. , 1956, The American journal of psychology.

[2]  O. Ducrot.  Présupposés et sous-entendus , 1969 .

[3]  H. Savin,et al.  The projection problem for presuppositions , 1971 .

[4]  Laurence R. Horn,et al.  On the semantic properties of logical operators in english' reproduced by the indiana university lin , 1972 .

[5]  L. Cohen,et al.  Some Remarks on Grice’s Views about the Logical Particles of Natural Language , 1975 .

[6]  H. Grice.  Logic and conversation , 1975 .

[7]  Gerald Gazdar,et al.  Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition, and Logical Form , 1978 .

[8]  Laurence R. Horn.  Remarks on Neg Raising , 1978 .

[9]  Hans Kamp,et al.  Semantics Versus Pragmatics , 1978 .

[10]  JOACHIM JACOBS,et al.  LEXICAL DECOMPOSITION IN MONTAGUE-GRAMMAR , 1980 .

[11]  D. Over,et al.  Studies in the Way of Words. , 1989 .

[12]  A. Avramides.  Studies in the Way of Words , 1992 .

[13]  David I. Beaver.  When Variables Don't Vary Enough , 1994 .

[14]  Yo Matsumoto.  The conversational condition on horn scales , 1995 .

[15]  A. Sorace,et al.  MAGNITUDE ESTIMATION OF LINGUISTIC ACCEPTABILITY , 1996 .

[16]  Bart Geurts,et al.  On No , 1996, J. Semant..

[17]  David I. Beaver,et al.  The Handbook of Logic and Language , 1997 .

[18]  Wayne Cowart,et al.  Experimental Syntax: Applying Objective Methods to Sentence Judgments , 1997 .

[19]  Fred Landman,et al.  Plurals and Maximalization , 1998 .

[20]  Carson T. Schütze.  The empirical base of linguistics: Grammaticality judgments and linguistic methodology , 1998 .

[21]  Sebastian Löbner,et al.  Polarity in Natural Language: Predication, Quantification and Negation in Particular and Characterizing Sentences , 2000 .

[22]  N. Kadmon,et al.  Formal Pragmatics: Semantics, Pragmatics, Presupposition, and Focus , 2001 .

[24]  Arnim von Stechow,et al.  Negative Indefinita unter Modalverben , 2001 .

[25]  Robyn Carston,et al.  Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication , 2002 .

[26]  R. Carston.  Thoughts and Utterances , 2002 .

[27]  Nat Hansen,et al.  Literal Meaning: Introduction , 2003 .

[28]  Benjamin Spector.  Scalar Implicatures: Exhaustivity and Gricean Reasoning , 2004 .

[29]  Katrin Schulz,et al.  Exhaustive Interpretation of Complex Sentences , 2004, J. Log. Lang. Inf..

[30]  Uli Sauerland,et al.  Scalar Implicatures in Complex Sentences , 2004 .

[31]  Katrin Schulz,et al.  You May Read It Now Or Later: A Case Study on the Paradox of Free Choice Permission , 2004 .

[32]  J. Gajewski.  Neg-raising : polarity and presupposition , 2005 .

[33]  Z. Szabó.  Semantics versus Pragmatics , 2005 .

[34]  Benjamin Spector.  Aspects de la pragmatique des opérateurs logiques , 2006 .

[35]  D. Fox.  Free Choice and the Theory of Scalar Implicatures , 2007 .

[36]  Benjamin Spector.  Aspects of the Pragmatics of Plural Morphology: On Higher-Order Implicatures , 2007 .

[37]  Jon Gajewski,et al.  Neg-Raising and Polarity , 2007 .

[38]  Benjamin Spector.  10: Scalar Implicatures: Exhaustivity and Gricean Reasoning , 2007 .

[39]  Roni Katzir,et al.  Structurally-defined alternatives , 2007 .

[40]  G. Chierchia,et al.  The Grammatical View of Scalar Implicatures and the Relationship between Semantics and Pragmatics , 2008 .

[41]  J. Gajewski,et al.  On the Calculation of Local Implicatures , 2008 .

[42]  E. Chemla.  Similarity: towards a unified account of scalar implicatures, free choice permission and presupposition projection , 2008 .

[43]  H. de Hoop,et al.  Semantics and pragmatics: From experiment to theory , 2009 .

[44]  B. Geurts,et al.  No scalar inferences under embedding. , 2009 .

[45]  E. Chemla.  Presuppositions of quantified sentences: experimental data , 2009 .

[46]  F. Récanati.  Embedded Implicatures , 2022 .