. Two simple generalized conversational implicatures are investigated :(1) the quantitative scalar implicature associated with ‘or’, and (2) the ‘not-and’-implicature, which is the dual to (1). It is argued that it is more fruitful to consider these implicatures as rules of interpretation and to model them in an algebraic fashion than to consider them as nonmonotonic rules of inference and to model them in a proof-theoretic way.

This work examines how people interpret the sentential connective “or”, which can be viewed either inclusively (A or B or both) or exclusively (A or B but not both). Following up on prior work concerning quantifiers (Noveck, 2001; Noveck & Posada, 2003; Bott & Noveck, 2004) which shows that the common pragmatic interpretation of “some,” some but not all, is conveyed as part of an effortful step, we investigate how extra effort applied to disjunctive statements leads to a pragmatic interpretation (...) of “or”, or but not both. Experiment 1 compelled participants to wait for three seconds before answering, hence giving them the opportunity to process the utterance more deeply. Experiments 2 and 3 emphasized “or”, either by visual means (“OR”) or by prosodic means (contrastive stress) as another way to encourage participants to apply more effort. Following a relevance-theoretic line of argument, we hypothesized that conditions encouraging more processing effort would give rise to more pragmatic inferences and hence to more exclusive interpretations of the disjunction. This prediction was confirmed in the three experiments. (shrink)

One of the tasks of language learning is the discovery of the intricate division of labour between the lexical-semantic content of an expression and the pragmatic inferences the expression can be used to convey. Here we investigate experimentally the development of the semantics– pragmatics interface, focusing on Greek-speaking five-year-olds’ interpretation of aspectual expressions such as arxizo (‘ start ’) and degree modifiers such as miso (‘ half ’) and mexri ti mesi (‘ halfway ’). Such expressions are known to give (...) rise to scalar inferences crosslinguistically : for instance, start, even though compatible with expressions denoting completion (e.g. finish), is typically taken to implicate non-completion. Overall, our experiments reveal that children have limited success in deriving scalar implicatures from the use of aspectual verbs but they succeed with ‘ discrete ’ degree modifiers such as ‘ half ’. Furthermore, children are better at spontaneously computing scalar implicatures than judging the pragmatic appropriateness of scalar statements. Finally, children can suspend scalar implicatures in environments where they are not supported. We discuss implications of these results for the scope and limitations of children’s ability to both acquire the lexical semantics of aspectuals and to compute implicatures as part of what the speaker means. (shrink)

Larry Horn is justifiably famous for his work on the semantics of the English conjunction or and both its relationship to the formal logic truth functions ∨ and @ (“inclusive” and “exclusive” disjunction respectively1) and its relationship to the ways people employ or in natural discourse. These interests have been present since his 1972 dissertation, where he argued for a “scalar implicature-based” account of many of these relationships as opposed to a presuppositional account. They have surfaced in his “Greek Grice” (...) paper (Horn 1973) as well as in his Negation book (Horn 1989) and his recent “Border Wars” paper (Horn, forthcoming) where he defends the position that there are two types of implicatures at work here: Q- implicatures based on Grice’s first maxim of Quantity (“Say Enough”) and R-implicatures based on Grice’s second maxim of Quantity (“Don’t Say Too Much”). In a nutshell, the idea is that when a speaker employs a sentence with a disjunction, the meaning (that is, the semantic value) of the or is inclusive. With careful and judicious use of the Q- and R-implicatures, Larry’s theory allows the hearer (often) to infer that the speaker wanted to convey an exclusive disjunction. (shrink)