I took Linguist 130A winter of my freshman year, so it was delightful to see this kind of material again. Perhaps the most important idea in pragmatics is that “speakers’ intended meanings go beyond the literal meaning of their utterances.”

In this week’s reading material there was a focus on children and their struggles with scalar implicatures. (Scalar implicatures refers to using weak terms to imply the negation of stronger ones that lie along the same “scale.”) More precisely, failing to have an adult-like response with some and all. It makes sense to me that children have an easier time with numerals, which have lexically strengthened, exact, meanings. In facts, I’d argue that this example is representative of learning in general as a young kid. I remember having the thought while in high school that I was constantly relearning concepts that were once taught to me in black and white.  When you’re a young kid learning is more about memorization than it is about thinking critically. Anyway, as stated in the Barner paper, it seems that implicatures require “additional processes” that you flex more as an adult.

It’s fascinating to me that children accept a weaker version of “or.” As I started taking Computer Science classes, it initially felt wrong to write code that logically followed a weaker “or” and I had to remind myself that a stronger “or” isn’t the only “or.”(Maybe in this way kids are smarter!) It’s also fascinating that kids do prefer stronger, more informative descriptions of scenes, but aren’t able to compute a scalar implicature just yet. They’re also able to assign strengthened interpretations when alternatives are provided contextually. It seems in the end that kids do know that “some” and “all” represent different set relations, but need additional learning.

Lastly, I hope we get to discuss further the idea of a “cooperative speaker.” In these readings I’ve learned that one rule for being a cooperative speaker is making your contribution “as informative as is required, and do not make your contribution more informative than required.” I’d like to review more rules! Another rule I can think of is to give factual responses.