Barner and Stiller

The idea of implicature was a new concept to me. I did some investigation and learned that implicature is, definitionally, “the action of implying a meaning beyond the literal sense of what is explicitly stated” (from Google). For example, if a friend comments that their friend’s “lamp really brightens up the room” they could be implying that they don’t like the aesthetic look of the lamp, i.e., they’re avoiding what they really mean. I found implicature to be a very enlightening aspect of language because it allows adults to state one thing but mean an entirely different thing altogether. Additionally, implicature determines that people will logically not say certain things, i.e., it has consequences for language usage. For example, it is highly unlikely that someone commenting on a friend’s beautiful new home would utter, “Your white walls are such an interesting color,” because white is known to not be an interesting color and it is the most common wall color. So, the obvious things around us are less likely to be talked about while the rarer things around us are more likely to be talked about (just like Stiller says the “top hats” in a world of rare top hats are more likely to be salient in conversation). This applies to what I have been learning in my Child Language Acquisition class: in that class, we have been learning that young children take certain things in the conversation as given and they are more likely to talk about new information than the given information. Overall, I learned that implicature has a close relation to language because it plays a role in what someone will say and how people will describe the world around them.

However, I objected to one of Barner’s implied assertions that children were wrong compared to adults in their ability to interpret a sentence containing scalar implicatures. The children and adults were shown a scene in which all three horses successfully jumped over a log. Then they were given a particular sentence to describe this scene, which was “Some of the horses jumped over the log.” The children tested mostly said that this was a good description of the event. In contrast, adults said it was not a good description “since all of the horses jumped over the log.” Barner believes the adult’s response was better because the “adults, unlike the 5-year-old-children, computed a scalar implicature” so the children’s response was not adult-like. I think there could be some formal logic principles involved in the interpretation of this statement, and I am not familiar with formal logic. But logically speaking, if “all” horses jumped, then obviously “some” must have jumped as well, right? Therefore, I see no reason why the children’s answer was “incorrect” or “un-adult-like.” While I understand that the goal of implicature is to create an implied correct meaning, to me there was nothing incorrect about the children’s statement simply because it is more literal and less absolute.