Universal Implicatures and Free Choice Effects

Experimental Data

Bibliographic Data

ID19039764
AuthorsEmmanuel Chemla (0000-0002-8423-5880, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume2
Publication date2009-05-23
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSemantics and Pragmatics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1937-8912 • E-ISSN: 1937-8912
PublisherLinguistic Society of America (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.3765/sp.2.2
OpenAlexW2041146141
LanguageEN
Citations received49
References cited16

Universal inferences like (i) have been taken as evidence for a local/syntactic treatment of scalar implicatures (i.e. theories where the enrichment of "some" into "some but not all" can happen sub-sententially): (i) Everybody read some of the books --> Everybody read [some but not all the books]. In this paper, I provide experimental evidence which casts doubt on this argument. The counter-argument relies on a new set of data involving free choice inferences (a sub-species of scalar implicatures) and negative counterparts of (i), namely sentences with the quantifier "no" instead of "every". The results show that the globalist account of scalar implicatures is incomplete (mainly because of free choice inferences) but that the distribution of universal inferences made available by the localist move remains incomplete as well (mainly because of the negative cases). doi:10.3765/sp.2.2 BibTeX info

Linguistics · Mathematical economics · Computer Science · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis · Mathematics · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Philosophy · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation · Artificial Intelligence