Differences and similarities between scalar inferences and scalar modifiers

Speakers that utter a sentence like in (1) are usually understood to communicated that they didn’t mean that all of Ann’s friends shared her grim view of the world. In order to explain this scalar implicature, the scalar expression a handful is assumed to evoke a set of alternatives whose members are ordered in terms of informativeness along the lines of (2). A listener reasons that the speaker used the most informative expression, and so informationally-stronger alternatives like most or all don’t hold (Horn 1972, Gazdar 1979, Levinson 2000, Geurts 2010, inter alia). (1) A handful of Ann’s friends shared her view of the world as a dark place.