One of the most astonishing features of human language is its capacity to convey information efficiently in context. Many theories provide informal accounts of communicative inference, yet there have been few successes in making precise, quantitative predictions about pragmatic reasoning. We examined judgments about simple referential communication games, modeling behavior in these games by assuming that speakers attempt to be informative and that listeners use Bayesian inference to recover speakers’ intended referents. Our model provides a close, parameter-free fit to human judgments, suggesting that the use of information-theoretic tools to predict pragmatic reasoning may lead to more effective formal models of communication.

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Predicting pragmatic reasoning in language games.

This chapter will be concerned with the conjunctive interpretation of a family of disjunctive constructions. The relevant conjunctive interpretation, sometimes referred to as a ‘free choice effect,’ (FC) is attested when a disjunctive sentence is embedded under an existential modal operator. I will provide evidence that the relevant generalization extends (with some caveats) to all constructions in which a disjunctive sentence appears under the scope of an existential quantifier, as well as to seemingly unrelated constructions in which conjunction appears under the scope of negation and a universal quantifier.

Free Choice and the Theory of Scalar Implicatures

Pragmatic Language Interpretation as Probabilistic Inference

The notion of measurement plays a central role in human cognition. We measure people’s height, the weight of physical objects, the length of stretches of time, or the size of various collections of individuals. Measurements of height, weight, and the like are commonly thought of as mappings between objects and dense scales, while measurements of collections of individuals, as implemented for instance in counting, are assumed to involve discrete scales. It is also commonly assumed that natural language makes use of both types of scales and subsequently distinguishes between two types of measurements. This paper argues against the latter assumption. It argues that natural language semantics treats all measurements uniformly as mappings from objects (individuals or collections of individuals) to dense scales, hence the Universal Density of Measurement (UDM). If the arguments are successful, there are a variety of consequences for semantics and pragmatics, and more generally for the place of the linguistic system within an overall architecture of cognition.

The universal density of measurement

Scalar implicatures depend on alternatives in order to avoid the symmetry problem. I argue for a structure-sensitive characterization of these alternatives: the alternatives for a structure are all those structures that are at most as complex as the original one. There have been claims in the literature that complexity is irrelevant for implicatures and that the relevant condition is the semantic notion of monotonicity. I provide new data that pose a challenge to the use of monotonicity and that support the structure-sensitive definition. I show that what appeared to be a problem for the complexity approach is overcome once an appropriate notion of complexity is adopted, and that upon closer inspection, the argument in favor of monotonicity turns out to be an argument against it and in favor of the complexity approach.

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Structurally-defined alternatives

Scalar implicature as a grammatical phenomenon

This chapter argues that the semantic behavior of bare plurals (and some other plural indefinites) provides evidence for the existence of higher-order implicatures, i.e. pragmatic inferences based on the comparison of a given sentence with the pragmatic meanings of its alternatives (and not only with their literal meanings). In a nutshell, I claim that a bare plural noun like horses denotes the set of individuals, be they atomic or complex, whose atomic parts are individual horses, and that the at-least-two-reading that one gets in sentences such as John has seen horses in the garden is an implicature that derives from the comparison of this sentence with John has seen a horse in the garden. In terms of its literal meaning, the latter sentence is true if and only if John has seen at least one horse in the garden, but gets pragmatically strengthened into John has seen exactly one horse in the garden (scalar implicature). As a result, John has seen horses in the garden will implicate the negation of John has seen exactly one horse in the garden, so that it will end up meaning John has seen several horses. I give an explicit formalization of the processes that lead to higher-order implicatures, based on the possibility of iterating an exhaustivity operator. The proposal accounts for the readings of plural indefinites in various linguistic contexts (monotone-decreasing contexts, non-monotonic contexts, and universally quantified contexts).

Aspects of the Pragmatics of Plural Morphology: On Higher-Order Implicatures

Chierchia (2002) presents a solution based on a recursive interpretation function which computes 'strengthened meanings' in tandem with the interpretation function that computes 'literal meanings. This chapter shows that both scalar implicatures and exhaustification of answers can be understood as the outcome of a pragmatic reasoning that is based on the Gricean maxims. It offers a precise formalization of the Gricean reasoning and shows that it is possible to predict the facts reviewed above by defining carefully what counts as an 'alternative answer' for a given answer to a certain question under discussion. The alternative set of any positive proposition is defined as the set of all positive propositions. The positive answers are predicted to be interpreted as exhaustive. The negative answers are not exhaustified, but nevertheless trigger some implieatures. The chapter concludes that that the facts regarding exhaustification can be directly derived from the Gricean reasoning. Keywords: Gricean reasoning; positive propositions; scalar implicatures

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10: Scalar Implicatures: Exhaustivity and Gricean Reasoning

Scalar implicatures are traditionally viewed as pragmatic inferences which result from a reasoning about speakers’ communicative intentions (Grice 1989). This view has been challenged in recent years by theories which propose that scalar implicatures are a grammatical phenomenon. Such theories claim that scalar implicatures can be computed in embedded positions and enter into the recursive computation of meaning—something that is not expected under the traditional, pragmatic view. Recently, Geurts and Pouscoulous (2009) presented an experimental study in which embedded scalar implicatures were not detected. Using a novel version of the truth value judgment tasks, we provide evidence that subjects sometimes compute embedded scalar implicatures.

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Experimental Evidence for Embedded Scalar Implicatures

Depuis quelques annees, l'etude des implicatures scalaires a ete renouvelee. Alors que, selon l'approche jusque-la dominante, issue des travaux de Paul Grice, il s'agit la d'inferences pragmatiques, decoulant d'un raisonnement a propos des intentions de l'auteur d'une phrase, des travaux recents ont montre que les analyses neo-griceennes etaient souvent empiriquement incorrectes des que l'on examine des cas assez complexes. Selon ces travaux, les implicatures scalaires sont produites par des mecanismes comparables a ceux qui derivent la signification litterale des phrases. S'attachant presque exclusivement a l'interpretation des elements grammaticaux, la premiere partie de cette these etablit que cette conclusion ne se justifie pas, en proposant une formalisation explicite des mecanismes d inference pragmatique sous-jacents aux implicatures scalaires, dont les predictions empiriques sont globalement superieures a celles des approches neo-griceennes classiques. La deuxieme partie applique et etend les resultats de la premiere a plusieurs problemes empiriques particuliers. Elle envisage la possibilite que, dans certains cas seulement, une implicature scalaire soit derivee par un processus grammatical plutot que purement pragmatique.

Benjamin Spector

Papers

Scalar implicature as a grammatical phenomenon

Aspects of the Pragmatics of Plural Morphology: On Higher-Order Implicatures

10: Scalar Implicatures: Exhaustivity and Gricean Reasoning

Experimental Evidence for Embedded Scalar Implicatures

Aspects de la pragmatique des opérateurs logiques