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Probability and implicatures: A unified account of the scalar effects of disjunction under modals

What it is about

"It's possible that we will hire Mary or Sue" suggests that each disjunct is possible: "possible Mary" and "possible Sue". Such effects are called distributive inferences under "likely" and "certain", and free choice inferences under "possible". The usual treatments give two different mechanisms. The paper proposes one. Epistemic modal adjectives are gradable: they are measures on a closed probability scale, with "possible" a minimum standard, "likely" a relative standard and "certain" a maximum standard. The scalar inferences are then derived by one exhaustification operator (exh), with the innocent-exclusion rule: an alternative is excluded only if its negation does not contradict the assertion and does not force another alternative. The authors show that this gives the distributive inferences as ordinary scalar implicatures, and that it also gives the free choice inferences under "possible". The argument is theoretical: the paper contains worked derivations and no experiments or numbers beyond a worked example with a standard of .5. Its key test is that the inferences vanish under negation ("It's not possible that we will hire Mary or Sue" does not imply either disjunct is possible), which the authors take as the mark of a scalar implicature.

Ideas

For Mova

The chapters are 33. Implicature and presupposition (scalar and free choice implicatures), 27. Negation (downward entailing contexts) and 13. Verbs (modal auxiliaries "may", "must", "might"). The code is prag/src/infer.rs for exhaustification, en/src/dict.rs for the modal scale, and world/src/knowledge.rs for test items. The measure: accuracy on positive and negated modal-disjunction items, run twice for determinism. The paper gives no data to measure against, so the test set is Mova's own.

Topics: Implicature

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3765/sp.10.13

@article{santorio2017probability,
  title = {{Probability and implicatures: A unified account of the scalar effects of disjunction under modals}},
  author = {Santorio, Paolo and Romoli, Jacopo},
  journal = {Semantics and Pragmatics},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.3765/sp.10.13},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.10.13}
}

References

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