"Can I have some fries?"

This week’s reading focused on scalar implicature – an implicature that attributes an implicit meaning beyond the explicit or literal meaning of an utterance – and the pragmatic differences in language between children and adults. Both papers look into why and how children have difficulty developing scales, unlike adults. From the readings, it is understood that adults rely more on linguistic pragmatics to interpret scalar alternatives, while children rely more on logical meaning. 

The Stiller paper discusses three experiments that focus on “ad-hoc” scalar implicature – the concept that some scales are derived from context, rather than conventional linguistic factors.

Stiller concludes that children experience difficulty understanding alternative quantifiers in a scale. The paper also explores how identification is affected by assumptions that stem from the usage of “some” versus “all”.  Stiller states that people would assume when asked to find someone with glasses meant that the face they were looking for was only wearing glasses and not a hat as well. When each face had multiple features, instead of none, some, or all, people experienced greater difficulty in identifying the target face. However, people were once again able to identify the target faces more easily when they were given context on the rarity of the features of the face.

Barner also looks into children’s ability to make inferences and assumptions from implicatures. Like Stiller, Barner agrees that children have difficulty generating alternative quantifiers like some and all. He notes the power of the word “some” in conveying the idea that is “not all” that can greatly impact the contextual meaning of sentences. Even though “some” could essentially mean “all”, it is interesting to note that it most often means “not all” and adults grasp this notion, while children often struggle. Barner also looks at how children’s understanding and interpretation of sentences differed based on context-specific information and the use of the word “only”. Barner noticed the word only has a significant effect on children’s interpretations of sentences involving “contextual alternatives”, but had no effect on their interpretation of sentences involving “context-independent alternatives”.

These readings made me think about the importance of scalar implicatures and implied meanings – what would be lost if people always used specific, definite language? Why do people say, “can I have some fries?” instead of “can I have two fries?” Scalar implicatures allow for different meanings of the same sentence – but, in my opinion, scalar implicatures sometimes also make communication easier. For example, it may seem rude to ask for a specific amount of fries from someone, so instead, people say “some”, so as to leave the exact amount up to the listener. Does the fact that children struggle with developing scales and alternative quantifiers correlate with the idea that such alternative quantifiers may often be used to conform to social norms of politeness and etiquette, which children are not aware of yet?