Guess Who?

Scalar implicature is a type of conversational shorthand of using weak terms to imply the negation of stronger ones that lie along the same “scale.” If I said “some students failed 107,” it can be inferred than some students didn’t fail, because if no one had passed, I would have used the stronger word of “all.” The acquisition of scalar implicature occurs later in life than most linguistic understandings, and children aren’t always the best at inferring information about the scale of an action based on the qualifier such as “some” or “all.”

As I read the Stiller, Goodman, and Frank paper, I couldn’t help but fixate on the idea of favoring informative, and thus typically unique, features like identifying someone by their mohawk rather than them having two legs. It made me think of playing the game Guess Who? and remembering the strategy of both using broad eliminators/identifiers (such as gender or having facial hair) and using the “jackpot” identifiers that really singled out players (wearing a hat or having blue eyes). Reflecting on times I played Guess Who? as a child, I remembered how I could identify that hats were more rare than facial hair, and blue eyes were more rare than brown ones. This is a great example of children’s ability to infer underlying implicature, but quantifying these traits using linguistic qualifiers like “some,” “most,” and “all” is where children struggle. In Guess Who? you ask “Does your person have white hair?” and there is no need to quantify using language about the number of potential candidates that have white hair.

Barner’s study focuses more so on pragmatic development, but I found myself fixated on the idea of the accuracy of scalar implicature. The example used about Mary eating John’s cake was particularly interesting to me, in the context of truths. If Mary had eaten the whole cake and said “I ate some of it,” John, as an adult, would likely interpret that as Mary eating some, but not all, of the cake. If John were to then go find a completely devoured cake, I imagine he would not be so happy, and think Mary had not told him the truth. The fascinating thing is that if she had said that she had eaten “all” of the cake, then in the process she ate “some” of the cake, because some is enclosed in the larger set of “all.” This means that Mary did indeed eat “some” of the cake, so it wasn’t a lie. This linguistic manipulation isn’t lying at all—it’s merely a manipulation that relies on our own assumptions as adult humans to assume negation of stronger qualifiers by choosing to use weaker ones. I am curious to learn of instances where using scalar implicature to one’s advantage in a courtroom situation ended up changing the direction of the case. Thankfully this manipulation can’t be used in the game of Guess Who? or else no kids would be beating their parents in the game.