It's maybe Somewhat Difficult but I Understand It!

Most studies of implicatures focused on conversational implicatures. This study, however, examined the conventional implicature induced by but. According to the literature, one can assume that the second argument in a ‘p but q’ construction is the argument with the most weight. This is, however, never experimentally tested with a direct distancingcontrastive but. We presented participants with stories which ended with a direct distancing but construction, in which one of the arguments expressed a feeling of understanding towards the behavior of the main character in the story. The results indicated that indeed the q-argument has most weight. There was, however, also an effect of the specific content of the stories. These results are discussed in light of the hypotheses generated on the basis of previous research with an indirect distancing-contrastive but, but also in the light of the effect of content of the stories in conventional implicatures research and specific task characteristics.

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