Work

Investigating the distribution of some (but not all) implicatures using corpora and web-based methods

Year: 2015

Type: article

Abstract: A prevalent, but to date untested, assumption about lexicalized scalar implicatures such as those from some to not all, is that they fall into the class of GCIs and as such, constitute a homogeneous class of highly regularized and context-independent implicatures. This paper reports a test of this assumption in which linguistically untrained participants’ implicature strength judgments were collected for naturally occurring utterances containing the word some in a large-scale corpus-based web study. The results indicate that implicature strength is highly variable and systematically dependent on features of the linguistic context such as the partitive, determiner strength, and discourse accessibility. These results call into question the GCI status of scalar implicatures from some to not all and demonstrate the usefulness of corpora and web-based methods for challenging received wisdom, enriching the empirical landscape, and informing theory in pragmatics. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.8.11 BibTeX info

Source: Semantics and Pragmatics

DOI: 10.3765/sp.8.11

Author: Judith Degen

Institution: Stanford University

Language: English

Topic: Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

Subfield: Language and Linguistics

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: diamond

Funders: National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health

Awards: G6671297155, Collaborative Research: Bayesian Cue Integration in Probability-Sensitive Language Processing, G9000156938