A Scalar Implicature (SI) arises when the use of a relatively weak sentence (e.g., some politicians are corrupt) implies the denial of an alternative, stronger sentence (e.g., not all politicians are corrupt). The cognitive effort associated with the processing of SIs involves central memory resources (De Neys and Schaeken, 2007; Dieussaert et al., 2011; Marty et al., 2013). The goal of this study is to locate this previous result within the current psycholinguistic debate, and to understand at which level of SI processing these resources are specifically involved. Using a dual-task approach, we show that (1) tapping participant's memory resources interferes with the derivation of SIs, whereas (2) it does not affect the interpretation of sentences involving similar competition mechanisms between a sentence and potential alternatives through the use of only (e.g., only some politicians are corrupt). We explain how these findings suggest that the central memory resources are not involved in the core process at the source of SIs, and discuss how this difference between SIs and only bears on recent linguistic debates on the division of labor between grammar and pragmatics.

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A disjunctive sentence like Olivia took Logic or Algebra conveys that Olivia didn’t take both classes (exclusivity) and that the speaker doesn’t know which of the two classes she took (ignorance). The corresponding sentence with a possibility modal, Olivia can take Logic or Algebra, conveys instead that she can take Logic and that she can take Algebra (free choice). These exclusivity, ignorance and free choice inferences are argued by many to be scalar implicatures. Recent work has looked at cases in which exclusivity and ignorance appear to be computed instead at the presupposition level, independently from the assertion. On the basis of those data, Spector and Sudo (Linguist Philos 40(5):473–517, 2017) have argued for a hybrid account relying on a pragmatic principle for deriving implicatures in the presupposition. In this paper, we observe that a sentence like Noah is unaware that Olivia can take Logic or Algebra has a reading on which free choice appears in the presupposition, but not in the assertion, and we show that deriving this reading is challenging on Spector and Sudo’s (2017) hybrid account. Following the dialectic in Fox (Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics, Palgrave, London, pp 71–120, 2007), we argue against a pragmatic approach to presupposition-based implicatures on the ground that it is not able to account for presupposed free choice. In addition, we raise a novel challenge for Spector and Sudo’s (2017) account coming from the conflicting presupposed ignorance triggered by sentences like #Noah is unaware that I have a son or a daughter, which is infelicitous even if it’s not common knowledge whether the speaker has a son or a daughter. More generally, our data reveals a systematic parallelism between the assertion and presupposition levels in terms of exclusivity, ignorance, and free choice. We argue that such parallels call for a unified analysis and we sketch how a grammatical theory of implicatures where meaning strengthening operates in a similar way at both levels (Gajewski and Sharvit in Nat Lang Semant 20(1):31–57, 2012; Magri in A theory of individual-level predicates based on blind mandatory scalar implicatures, MIT dissertation, 2009; Marty in Implicatures in the DP domain, MIT dissertation, 2017) can account for such parallels.

We investigate the mechanisms proposed in formal semantics to account for the ambiguity generated by simple numerical expressions (e.g., 'three students'). We explain how these mechanisms, when applied to more complex numerical expressions such as 'between n and m' (e.g., 'between three and five students'), predict a surprising ambiguity between a doubly-bounded (e.g., 'at least three and at most five students') and a lower-bounded reading (e.g., 'at least three students'). While the lower-bounded reading is not detectable intuitively, results from three offline experiments and a response time study provide evidence in favor of its existence. Our contribution is twofold. On the experimental side, we present two psycholinguistic methods powerful enough to detect what we call phantom readings, i.e. readings that do not seem to have consequences for actual interpretation, but have detectable effects on processing. On the theoretical side, we show that certain semantic mechanisms that might be thought to overgenerate are in fact vindicated, since they are able to predict certain processing facts that would otherwise remain mysterious. We discuss how these results illustrate the need for a strong integration of formal semantics and psycholinguistic approaches. 1

Sprouse and Almeida (2017) provide a first systematic investigation of the sensitivity of four acceptability judgment tasks. In this project, we build on these results by decomposing those tasks into three constituent task features (single versus joint presentation, number of response options, and use of response labels), and explore the consequences of those task features on the sensitivity of acceptability judgment experiments. We present 6 additional experiments (for a total of 10) designed to probe the effect of those task features on sensitivity, both independently and in combination. Our results suggest three notable conclusions: (i) there is a clear advantage to joint presentation of theoretically-related sentence types, regardless of the type of response scale used in the experiment; (ii) tasks involving a continuous slider (which have an infinite number of response options, and few labels) offer good sensitivity, while relying solely on spatial reasoning rather than numeric reasoning; and (iii) there are a number of subtle interactions among the three task features that may warrant further investigation. We discuss the potential benefits and concerns of each of these features in detail, along with the relevance of these findings for deciding how to investigate both simple and higher-order acceptability contrasts.