The Presuppositions of Soft Triggers are Obligatory Scalar Implicatures

The Presuppositions of Soft Triggers are Obligatory Scalar Implicatures

Presupposition triggers can be divided in two groups, ‘soft’ and ‘hard,’ based on whether the presuppositions they give rise to are easily defeasible and whether they project uniformly in quantificational sentences (Abusch 2002, 2010, Charlow 2009). Recently, two ideas have been put forward in the literature in connection to this problem. First, soft triggers should be thought of as non-presupp...

Projecting Presuppositions with Scalar Implicatures

I present a system which reconciles free choice permission effect with other scalar implicatures. The core idea is to cluster together alternatives which are obtained by similar transformations of the original sentence (e.g., replacement of a given item with a stronger item). Interestingly, this system can be extended to account for presupposition projection.

Presuppositions vs. Scalar Implicatures in Aquisition

Predicting the presuppositions of soft triggers

The central idea behind this paper is that presuppositions of soft triggers arise from the way our attention structures the informational content of a sentence. Some aspects of the information conveyed are such that we pay attention to them by default, even in the absence of contextual information. On the other hand, contextual cues or conversational goals can divert attention to types of infor...

Are Scalar Implicatures Computed Online?

Since Horn (1972) the notion of conversational implicature proposed by Grice has been put to use to explain certain interpretive differences between expressions in natural language and their counterparts in formal logic. For example, the sentences in (1) seem to convey more than they would be expected to if the natural language disjunction or had the same meaning as the logical disjunction∨, or...