Conditional antecedents provide no evidence for a grammatical theory of scalar implicature
نویسنده
چکیده
Recent work in formal pragmatics has devoted much attention to the question of whether scalar implicatures are generated by conversational reasoning or by grammatical devices. The former approach has been dominant for some time, due in large measure to the work of Grice (1975, 1989). However, there has been a recent flourishing of grammatically-oriented alternatives in which scalar implicatures are generated by insertion of a silent exhaustification operator in the syntax. The most influential references are Chierchia 2006; Chierchia et al. 2012. This paper discusses one of the most influential arguments that have been put forward in favor of a grammatical approach to scalar implicature, and shows that it a non-starter: data involving the behavior of scalar items in conditional antecedents fails to provide evidence of any kind in favor of the grammatical approach to scalar implicature. The arguments that have been put forward begin with the assumption that the examples in (1) should be infelicitous if the antecedents are not strengthened by (in effect) a silent version of only.
منابع مشابه
Title : The Computation of Scalar Implicatures : Pragmatic ,
I provide an overview of current theories of scalar implicature: the pragmatic (or Gricean), the lexical and the grammatical theory. The empirical focus are global and local, but also intermediate implicatures. I argue that the grammatical theory is conceptually less well motivated than even a combination of the pragmatic and the lexical theory, and that the grammatical theory therefore require...
متن کاملEmbedded Implicatures as Pragmatic Inferences under Compositional Lexical Uncertainty
How do comprehenders reason about pragmatically ambiguous scalar terms like some in complex syntactic contexts? In many pragmatic theories of conversational implicature, local exhaustification of such terms (‘only some’) is predicted to be difficult or impossible if the result does not entail the literal meaning, whereas grammatical accounts predict such construals to be robustly available. Rec...
متن کاملCounterfactual antecedent falsity and the epistemic sensitivity of counterfactuals
Why do utterances of counterfactual conditionals typically, but not universally, convey the message that their antecedents are false? I demonstrate that two common theoretical commitments–commitment to the existence of scalar implicature and of informative presupposition–can be supplemented with an independently motivated theory of the presuppositions of competing conditional alternatives to jo...
متن کاملPresuppositions and Antipresuppositions in Conditionals
Utterances of counterfactual conditionals are typically attended by the information that their antecedents are false. But there is as yet no account of the source of this information that is both detailed and complete. This paper describes the problem of counterfactual antecedent falsity and argues that the problem can be addressed by appeal to an adequate account of the presuppositions of vari...
متن کاملThe neural computation of scalar implicature
Language comprehension involves not only constructing the literal meaning of a sentence but also going beyond the literal meaning to infer what was meant but not said. One widely-studied test case is scalar implicature: The inference that, e.g., Sally ate some of the cookies implies she did not eat all of them. Research is mixed on whether this is due to a rote, grammaticalized procedure or ins...
متن کامل