Plurality inferences are scalar implicatures: Evidence from acquisition

Abstract

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>This paper provides novel experimental evidence for a scalar implicature approach to the plurality inferences that are associated with English plural morphology (</span><span>Emily fed giraffes </span><span>-> </span><span>Emily fed more than one giraffe</span><span>). Using a Truth Value Judgment Task, we show that both adults and 4–5-year-old children compute more plurality inferences in upward-entailing than downward-entailing environments, but children compute fewer plurality inferences overall than adults do. These findings are consistent with previous research demonstrating children’s relative insensitivity to scalar implicatures. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of plurality inferences, and for the acquisition of scalar inferences more generally. </span></p></div></div></div>

The abundance inference of pluralised mass nouns is an implicature: Evidence from Greek

“…In the next subsection, we turn to the different predictions they make in relation to the status of positive and negative plural sentences in certain contexts, and the comparison between (preschool-aged) children and adults on the interpretation of these sentences. These predictions motivated the previous experiments reported in Tieu et al (2014;, which investigated multiplicity inferences, as well as the present study, which extends the investigation of the predictions of both approaches to the abundance inference.…”

“…As we will discuss, our results replicate the patterns reported in Tieu et al (2014; for multiplicity inferences, crucially revealing an analogous pattern for abundance inferences. The findings provide further support for an implicature approach to the multiplicity inference and an extension of the approach to abundance inferences.…”

“…In the following sections, we first show how the ambiguity approach and the implicature approach to the multiplicity inference of pluralised count nouns can be extended to account for the abundance inference of pluralised mass nouns. We then further test the predictions of the two approaches for multiplicity and abundance inferences in Greek, extending the previous experimental studies by Tieu et al (2014;. In particular, we compare adults' and preschool-aged children's performance on abundance inferences, multiplicity inferences, and the 'not all' implicature of merika 'some' illustrated in (22), which suggests that the lion didn't carry all of the apples.…”

“…8 As discussed in , while both approaches can account for the upward-versus downward-entailing pattern of multiplicity inferences, they differ in what they predict with respect to the acquisition of these inferences and their relationship with scalar implicatures. Tieu et al (2014; tested the predictions of the two approaches for multiplicity inferences in English, and report evidence for the implicature approach to multiplicity inferences.…”

“…We also discuss the predictions of the two approaches in relation to adults' and children's behaviour. In Section 3, we summarise the previous studies by Tieu et al (2014;, which tested the predictions of the two accounts for the multiplicity inference; we show how their paradigm can be extended to a novel investigation of the abundance inference. In Section 4, we present our experiment comparing the two inferences in children and adults, and in Section 5 we discuss the results in the context of the predictions of the two approaches.…”