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In recent years, experimental research has demontrated great variability in the rates of scalar inferences across different triggering expressions (Doran et al. 2009, 2012, van Tiel et al. 2016). These studies have been taken as evidence against the so-called uniformity assumption, which posits that scalar implicature is triggered by a single mechanism and that the behaviour of one scale should generalize to the whole family of scales. In the following, we present an experimental study that tests negative strengthening for a variety of strong scalar terms, following up on van Tiel et al. (2016). For example, we tested whether the statement John is not brilliant is strengthened to mean that John is not intelligent (see especially Horn 1989). We show that endorsement rates of the scalar implicature (e.g., John is intelligent but not brilliant) are anti-correlated with endorsements of negative strengthening. Further, we demonstrate that a modified version of the uniformity hypothesis taking into account negative strengthening is consistent with van Tiel et al.’s data. Therefore, variation across scales may be more systematic than suggested by the van Tiel et al. study.
Previous research on scalar implicature has primarily relied on metalinguistic judgment tasks and found varying rates of such inferences depending on the nature of the task and contextual manipulations. This paper introduces a novel interactive paradigm involving both a production and a comprehension component, thereby fixing a precise conversational context.
The main research question is what is reliably communicated by some in this communicative setting, when the quantifier occurs in unembedded positions as well as embedded positions. Our new paradigm involves an action-based task from which participants’ interpretation of utterances can be inferred. It incorporates a game–theoretic design, including a precise model to predict participants’ behaviour in the experimental context.
Our study shows that embedded and unembedded implicatures are reliably communicated by some. We propose two cognitive principles which describe what can be left unsaid. In our experimental context, a production strategy based on these principles is more efficient (with equal communicative success and shorter utterances) than a strategy based on literal descriptions.
In this paper, we outline the foundations of a theory of implicatures. It divides into two parts. The first part contains the base model. It introduces signalling games, optimal answer models, and a general definition of implicatures in terms of natural information. The second part contains a refinement in which we consider noisy communication with efficient clarification requests. Throughout, we assume a fully cooperative speaker who knows the information state of the hearer. The purpose of this paper is not the study of examples. Our concern is the framework for doing these studies.