Remarks on the Experimental Turn in the Study of Scalar Implicature, Part II

for Part I and Part II) There has been a recent ‘experimental turn’ in the study of scalar implicature, yielding important results concerning online processing and acquisition. This paper highlights some of these results and places them in the current theoretical context. We argue that there is sometimes a mismatch between theoretical and experimental studies, and we point out how some of these mismatches can be resolved. We furthermore highlight ways in which the current theoretical and experimental landscape is richer than is often assumed, and in light of this discussion we offer some suggestions for what seem to us promising directions for the experimental turn to explore. The article is divided in two parts. Part I first presents the two dominant families of accounts of scalar implicature, the domain-general Gricean account and the domain-specific grammatical account. We try to separate the various components of these theories and connect them to relevant psycholinguistic predictions. Part II examines and reinterprets several prominent experimental results in light of the theoretical presentation proposed in the first part. 1 Background on scalar implicature 1.1 The traditional introduction Hearing a sentence such as (1), Some of Mary’s students got an A, a competent speaker of English will most naturally conclude that not all of Mary’s students got an A. This inference is called a scalar implicature. Uncontroversially, this inference is the result of some competition between two alternatives: the uttered sentence (1) and a minimally different unspoken sentence (2). The competition here resolves in the inference that the alternative in (2) is false, i.e., in the scalar implicature in (3). The conjunction of the literal meaning of the sentence and its scalar implicature is the ‘strengthened meaning’ of the sentence, (4). (1) Some of Mary’s students got an A. (2) Alternative: All of Mary’s students got an A. (3) Scalar implicature: Not all of Mary’s students got an A.