Training and Timing Local Scalar Enrichments under Global Pragmatic Pressures

Elementary sentences containing the quantificational determiner some seem to be ambiguous between a ‘weak’ existential meaning ∃ and a ‘strengthened’ some but not all meaning ∃+. The strengthened meaning is commonly assumed to be the output of a general enrichment mechanism, call it G (for ‘global’), that applies to the weak meaning of the sentence: G(∃) = ∃+. The application of G has been shown to come with a processing cost (e.g., Bott and Noveck 2004). We used a self-paced reading task together with offline comprehension questions to investigate the interpretation of sentences containing some when embedded inside a disjunction, a position that G cannot access. Our findings suggest (i) that the strengthened meaning ∃+ is available in embedded positions, suggesting that a mechanism of local strengthening L must be available: L(∃) = ∃+, (ii) that local enrichment can be facilitated by global pragmatic pressures (Chierchia et al. 2008, Mayr and Romoli 2014), (iii) that subjects can be quickly trained to systematically prefer one of G or L to the other, (iv) that application of L, like the application of G, comes with a processing cost. We highlight consequences of our findings for debates about the characterization of enrichment mechanisms, focussing on the relation between G and L. ∗We thank Amir Anvari, Danny Fox, Lyn Frazier, Ted Gibson, Roni Katzir, Jacopo Romoli, Benjamin Spector, Ida Toivonen, Shravan Vasishth, Ken Wexler, and audiences at MIT, XPrag 2013, AMLaP 2014, and TOM 6 at McGill University. The paper has improved thanks to helpful comments from three anonymous reviewers for Journal of Semantics, and the editor Bernhard Schwarz. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement n.313610 and was supported by ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL* and ANR-10-LABX-0087 IEC, as well as by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, grant number 435-2012-1573.