Free Choice and the Theory of Scalar Implicatures

Fox, Danny

doi:10.1057/9780230210752_4

Cited by 625 publications

(596 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Some authors have since generalized the notion of an ordered scale to that of an unordered set of lexical alternatives (e.g., Sauerland 2004, Fox 2007, others have been even more liberal, or so it seems, by comparing utterances to the set of possible answers to some possibly implicit question under discussion (van Kuppevelt 1996, van Rooij & Schulz 2004, Spector 2006. The issue of which alternatives to consider for derivation of quantity implicatures is, however, still ongoing (cf., Katzir 2007, Swanson 2010.…”

Section: Quantity Implicatures: Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Quantity implicatures, exhaustive interpretation, and rational conversation

Franke

2011

S&P

189

113

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Quantity implicatures are inferences triggered by an utterance based on what other utterances a speaker could have made instead. Using ideas and formalisms from game theory, I demonstrate that these inferences can be explained in a strictly Gricean sense as rational behavior. To this end, I offer a procedure for constructing the context of utterance insofar as it is relevant for quantity reasoning as a game between speaker and hearer. I then give a new solution concept that improves on classical equilibrium approaches in that it uniquely selects the desired "empirically correct" play in these interpretation games by a chain of back-and-forth reasoning about players' behavior. To make this formal approach more accessible to a wider audience, I give a simple algorithm with the help of which the model's solution can be computed without having to do heavy calculations of probabilities, expected utilities and the like. This rationalistic approach subsumes and improves on recent exhaustivity-based approaches. It makes correct and uniform predictions for quantity implicatures of various epistemic varieties, free choice readings of disjunctions, as well as a phenomenon tightly related to the latter, namely so-called "simplification of disjunctive antecedents".

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Section: Quantity Implicatures: Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An utterance of a plain disjunction as in (8) is usually compared to the alternatives in (9) (cf., Sauerland 2004, Fox 2007, and it is associated with the ignorance implicature in (10) that the speaker is uncertain about each disjunct. …”

Section: Quantity Implicatures: Some Relevant Casesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantity implicatures, exhaustive interpretation, and rational conversation

Franke

2011

S&P

189

113

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“…All cardinalities are consistent with these meanings, and they therefore provide no informative boundaries to new numeral denotations. 13 Thus, our suggestion is that the child uses augmented meanings to compute implicatures for unknown numerals (akin to what Spector, 2007, calls a "second-order implicature" in his discussion of the singular-plural distinction; for similar proposals extended to disjunction and other quantifiers, see Fox, 2007;Chierchia, 2004;Kratzer & Shimoyama, 2002;Chierchia, Spector, & Fox, 2007). 14 Since the augmented meaning of one (exactly one) specifies an upper bound, it can meaningfully restrict the interpretation of three to "some cardinality greater than one".…”

Section: Informative Boundaries To Implicaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Inference and exact numerical representation in early language development

Barner¹,

Bachrach²

2016

Preprint

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How do children as young as 2 years of age know that numerals, like one, have exact interpretations, while quantifiers and words like a do not? Previous studies have argued that only numerals have exact lexical meanings. Children could not use scalar implicature to strengthen numeral meanings, it is argued, since they fail to do so for quantifiers (Papafragou & Musolino, 2003). Against this view, we present evidence that children's early interpretation of numerals does rely on scalar implicature, and argue that differences between numerals and quantifiers are due to differences in the availability of the respective scales of which they are members.Evidence from previous studies establishes that (1) children can make scalar inferences when interpreting numerals, (2) children initially assign weak, non-exact interpretations to numerals when first acquiring their meanings, and (3) children can strengthen quantifier interpretations when scalar alternatives are made explicitly available.

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“…Schwarz assumes that at least and only form a Horn scale, and that the set of numerals does as well, so among the expression alternatives for at least three are at least four, at least five, etc., as well as only three, only four, etc. The resulting structure of alternatives yields ignorance implicatures through Fox's (2007) method of innocent exclusion.…”

Section: Analyses Of Superlative Modifiersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Superlative Modifiers as Modified Superlatives

Coppock¹

2016

SALT

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The superlative modifiers at least and at most are quite famous, but their cousins at best, at the latest, at the highest, etc., are less well-known. This paper is devoted to the entire family. New data is presented illustrating the productivity of the pattern, identifying a generalization delimiting it, and showing that the cousins, too, have the pragmatic effects that have attracted so much attention to at least and at most. To capture the productivity, I present a new decomposition of at least into recombinable parts. Most notable is the at-component (silent in some languages), which takes advantage of the comparison class argument of the superlative to produce the set of possibilities involved in the ignorance implicatures that superlative modifiers are known for. A side-effect is a new view on gradable predicates, accounting for uses like 88 degrees is too hot.

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Free Choice and the Theory of Scalar Implicatures

Cited by 625 publications

References 12 publications

Quantity implicatures, exhaustive interpretation, and rational conversation

Quantity implicatures, exhaustive interpretation, and rational conversation

Inference and exact numerical representation in early language development

Superlative Modifiers as Modified Superlatives

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