This week's readings dealt with pragmatic inferences and how people use scalar alternatives to gain information that isn't explicitly stated.
As I was reading, I was reminded of a certain Spanish joke I grew up hearing quite a bit. There were often times when someone was speaking and they would say, for example, "Me voy a salir 'pa fuera," which roughly translates (in most contexts) to, "I'm going outside." However, the verb "salir" literally means "to exit" and "pa(ra) fuera" literally means "to outside," making the literal translation more like, "I'm going to exit to outside."
Now, this is quite redundant, because if you're going to exit (the building, usually), it's pretty obvious you're going to be outside. A comment like this would usually get the response "y pa' dentro no vas a salir?" which means, "so you're not going to exit to inside." The literal translation is a bit redundant, but it gets at the nature of the joke. You can't exit somewhere and end up inside of it.
This childhood joke came to mind because it represented the opposite situation that was discussed in the readings. The speaker was unnecessarily giving redundant information. I think it's interesting how, based on the readings, listeners use contextual information to infer what a speaker giving insufficient information is talking about and how, based on my experience, if a speaker gives excess and unnecessary information, it can get turned into a joke.
I guess an equivalent situation based on the reading would be "the face with the top hat that is wearing the top hat" or something similar (if someone said something like that one day, I'm sure it would get pointed out).
Since I was on the topic of different languages, I also wondered how pragmatic inferences and scalar alternatives might play a role in other languages (more developed ones as well as the ones we looked at in class that follow different phrase structure rules and syntax rules). This might be able to shed some light on how the structure of language can affect how different individuals might develop their understanding of the world based on the kinds of inferences they end up making.
NOTE: In Spanish, this seems to work similarly (the scalar items "algunos" and "todos" seem to work, at first glance, the same as "some" and "all," respectively).
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ReplyDeleteHi Gabriel, thanks for your post. My native language is actually Spanish and I’ve heard that joke multiple times – those redundant phrases that you mention are called “pleonasmos” and there’s actually quite a few of them that are thrown around as jokes in Spanish. Great connection.
ReplyDeleteRegarding your final question, I do believe that the role of scalar alternatives can change significantly from language to language. I don’t think, however, that the capacity for pragmatic inference (given enough context) changes based on the language spoken – as experiment 1 in the Stiller, Goodman and Frank reading demonstrates, children develop this capacity early in their lives even though they might have trouble “contrasting lexical items”. I do believe though that some languages are more complicated than others, and that for some of these languages, it might be harder for children to make sense of the language structure and to compare word scales. This could in turn be potentially reflected as a decreased capacity to detect scalar implicatures in language.
I'm glad that you brought up scalars in other languages; I was wondering about how this theory worked outside of English as well. While in Spanish it would probably function in an identical fashion, are there languages which possess scalars that operate differently, or that lack major scalars like "some-all"? Are there language groups in which children are better or worse at identifying scalars? This could potentially make for an interesting study, especially if certain scalars carry slightly different meanings across languages.
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