Scalar Implicatures: Pragmatic Inferences or Grammar?

What it is about

This is a theoretical paper with no new data or measurements. It reviews the debate on scalar implicatures: the Gricean pragmatic account against the grammatical account, which uses an exhaustivity operator (Exh) in the LF syntax. The paper looks at two problems: the disjunction problem and the global versus local problem. The author argues that scalar implicatures come from Gricean reasoning, but are rooted in grammar through contrastive topic (CT). CT requires a concessive "but" conjunction (pero/aber), which is why scalar implicatures begin with "but" across languages. The paper also links contrastive focus (CF) with the "sino/sondern" conjunction, a metalinguistic negation. Its concluding claim is that CT with pero/aber suppresses R-implicatures, and CF with sino/sondern suppresses Q-implicatures.

Ideas

• I1. The paper gives no data, so there is no measure to copy. Its one testable claim is that a concessive "but" is the trigger for a scalar implicature. Write it as a rule in prag: a "but" clause after a scalar term is marked as contrastive, and the implicature is recorded with the rule that fired.
• I2. Build a small English test list: "some X but not all", "not X but Y" (the metalinguistic reading), and "X, but Y" (the concessive reading). Label each item by hand and measure how often the rule separates the three.
• I3. Use the paper's split between the two suppressions as two separate flags on the implicature, so that each can be switched off in a negative-control run.

For Mova

The chapters are 33. Implicature and presupposition and 38. Dialogue, discourse markers and reported speech. The code is prag/src/infer.rs. The measure is the accuracy of the contrast rule on a hand-labelled English set, run twice for determinism, with a shuffled-label negative control.

Topics: Implicature

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{lee2008scalar,
  title = {{Scalar Implicatures: Pragmatic Inferences or Grammar?}},
  author = {Lee, Chungmin},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 22nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation},
  year = {2008},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/Y08-1003/}
}

References

16 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Anscrombre, J.-C. and O. Ducrot. 1977. find
2. Breheny, R., N. Katsos, J. Williams. 2006. Are Generalized Scalar Implicatures Generated by Default? Cognition 100, pp. 434 - 463. find
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12. CSLI, Stanford Lee, Chungmin 2006 ‘Contrastive (Predicate) Topic/Focus and Polarity in Discourse,’ in von Heusinger and K. Turner (eds) Where Semantics Meets Pragmatics CRiSPI, Elsevier. find
13. Potts, C. 2005. The Logic of Conventional Implicatures. Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics. OUP. find
14. Russell, B. 2006. Against Grammatical Computation of Scalr Implicatures, Journal of Semantics 23. 361-381. , Sauerland, Uli 2004 ‘On Embedded Implicatures,’ Journal of Cognitive Science 5 (1). find
15. Sevi, Aldo 2005 Exhaustivity, Tel Aviv University Dissertation. find
16. Zeevat, H. 1994 ‘Applying an Exhaustifying Operator in Update Semantics.’ In H. Kamp (ed.). Deux mais en francais? Lingua 43. 23-40. find

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