Scalar implicature in Chitonga-speaking children

Scalar Implicature

Ad-hoc scalar implicature in adults and children

Linguistic communication relies on pragmatic implicatures such as the inference that if “some students passed the test,” not all did. Yet young children perform poorly on tests of implicature, especially scalar implicatures using “some” and “all,” until quite late in development. We investigate the origins of scalar implicature using tasks in which the scale arises from real-world context rathe...

Informativeness, Relevance and Scalar Implicature

1. Introduction The main topic of this paper is the phenomenon of scalar implicature. Typical examples are given in (1)-(4): (1) a. Bill has got some of Chomsky's papers. b. The speaker believes that Bill hasn't got all of Chomsky's papers. (2) a. There will be five of us for dinner tonight. b. There won't be more than five of us for dinner tonight. (3) a. X: I like Mary. She's intelligent and ...

Scalar Implicature and Local Pragmatics

The Gricean theory of conversational implicature has always been plagued by data suggesting that what would seem to be conversational inferences may occur within the scope of operators like believe, for example; which for bona fide implicatures should be an impossibility. Concentrating my attention on scalar implicatures, I argue that, for the most part, such observations can be accounted for w...

Scalar implicature processing in high-functioning autism

The project aims at comparing typical and autistic participants with respect to their processing of the scalar implicature not all associated with the weak quantifier some. Highfunctioning autists often show atypical performance with respect to pragmatic aspects of language processing, including difficulties with the processing of defeasible reasoning, pragmatic inferences and linguistic inform...