Informativeness, Relevance and Scalar Implicature
نویسنده
چکیده
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 good-hearted. Y: She's intelligent. b. Y doesn't think Mary is good-hearted. (4) a. She won't necessarily get the job. b. She will possibly get the job. The idea is that, in a wide range of contexts, utterances of the sentences in (a) in each case will communicate the assumption in (b) in each case (or something closely akin to it, there being a certain amount of contextually governed variation in the speaker's propositional attitude and so the scope of the negation). These scalar inferences are taken to be one kind of (generalized) conversational implicature. As is the case with pragmatic inference quite generally, these inferences are defeasible (cancellable), which distinguishes them from entailments, and they are nondetachable, which distinguishes them from conventional implicatures. The core idea is that the choice of a weaker element from a scale of elements ordered in terms of semantic strength (that is, numbers of entailments) tends to implicate that, as far as the speaker knows, none of the stronger elements in the scale holds in this instance. The pattern is quite clear in (1) and (2), where the weak/strong alternatives are some/all and five/six respectively. In the case of (3), the stronger expression must be intelligent and good-hearted which entails intelligent; what Y's utterance implicates is that Mary does not have the two properties: intelligence and good-heartedness, so that, given the proposition expressed (Mary is intelligent) it follows, deductively, that she is not good-hearted, in Y's opinion. The example in (4) involves a scale inversion due to the negation, so that the weak/strong alternatives are not necessarily/not possibly; the negation which the scalar inference generates creates a double negation, which is eliminated giving possibly. Accounting for these sorts of examples, and more complicated scalar cases, has been, and still is, a central concern in neo-Gricean pragmatics (see references to Horn, Gazdar, Levinson, Hirschberg, Matsumoto, Welker, van Kuppevelt), but it has received relatively little attention in relevance-theoretic pragmatics. However, in the recent Postface …
منابع مشابه
Pragmatic tolerance: Implications for the acquisition of informativeness and implicature
Recent investigations of the acquisition of scalar implicature report that young children do not reliably reject a sentence with a weak scalar term, e.g. 'some of the books are red', when it is used as a description of a situation where a stronger statement is true, e.g. where all the books are red. This is taken as evidence that children do not interpret the sentence with the implicature that ...
متن کاملProbabilistic integration of linguistic framing in ad-hoc pragmatic implicatures
Language comprehenders make a wide variety of pragmatic inferences to determine the meaning of ambiguous utterances in context. These inferences are affected by both the informativeness of the alternative messages with respect to an interpretation and the relevance of potential interpretations within the context (Grice, 1975). We use simple referential games to explore the interaction of these ...
متن کاملAd-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...
متن کاملAspectuality and Scalar Structure
Such aspectual verbs and degree modifiers can be treated as scalar expressions with lower-bounded (‘at least’) semantics (on scalar semantics, see Horn, 1972; Gazdar, 1979; Atlas and Levinson, 1981; Atlas, 1984; Grice, 1989; Levinson, 2000). In cases where this semantic content falls short of the informativeness and relevance expectations raised by the conversational exchange, the hearer is ent...
متن کاملSQUINKY! A Corpus of Sentence-level Formality, Informativeness, and Implicature
We introduce a corpus of 7,032 sentences rated by human annotators for formality, informativeness, and implicature on a 1-7 scale. The corpus was annotated using Amazon Mechanical Turk.1 Reliability in the obtained judgments was examined by comparing mean ratings across two MTurk experiments, and correlation with pilot annotations (on sentence formality) conducted in a more controlled setting. ...
متن کامل