Pencils and pragmatics

This week’s readings is about scalar implicature. Barner studied how children fail to make scalar implicatures due to lack of knowledge on scalar alternatives, and Stiller tried to compare the theory of scalar alternatives to ad-hoc implicatures, or implicatures drawn from surrounding context.

The readings made me realize the difference between English and Thai scalar implicatures. Firstly,Thais do not use the words like “few” or “a lot” to describe a number of countable items. Instead, they use a precise range or number, which will change according to how specific the message is (i.e. “Can I borrow 2-3 pencils?” or “Could you lend me 5 pencils?”). This very nature of Thai language leads to the next difference.

Secondly, Thais tend to add extra words to broaden the meaning of the numbers because they do not use “few” or “a lot.” For example, when Thais say “ขอยืมดินสอ 5 แท่งหน่อย” (Could you lend me 5 pencils, please?), a listener can guess that the speaker is asking for exactly 5 pencils. If the speaker adds the word “about” into the sentence, “ขอยืมดินสอ‘ซัก’ 5 แท่งหน่อย” (Could you lend me ‘about’ 5 pencils, please?), the listener can implicate that the speaker wanted anywhere between 3-7 pencils, even though the range is not stated. The word “about” forces the listener to loosen the meaning of the number, which has the opposite function of “only” in the Barner reading.

Thirdly, the broadness of the range affects how specific the Thai speaker is. For instance, the sentence “Can I borrow 7-8 pencils?” is a lot more specific than “Can I borrow 5-10 pencils?” Although this might sound obvious, this broadness in range is a very common way of indicating how certain or how specific the speaker is. In fact, a large group of thieves were often recorded in historical texts as “The 500 thieves” simply because no one knows exactly how many people are in the group, and the 500 implies an arbitrarily large group of people.

Another feature of Thai is that the words “some”, “half”, or “all” when used on countable nouns will always imply that the speaker is referring to a fraction of or the entire group of people or items. For example, “ดินสอบางแท่งเป็นสีดำ” (some of the pencils are black.) The Thai speaker means that among all of the pencils in a particular group, some of them are black. Thus, if a Thai uses words that do not specify an exact number for countable objects, one can infer that the he or she is referring to a number in comparison to a group. Unlike Thai, the English word “some” does not have to refer to a group such as “Can I borrow some pencils?”

The comparison above demonstrates how scalar implicature is used differently across languages, and I think it will be an interesting topic to do a study crossing between historical linguistics and pragmatics to determine why language develop different ways of using scalar implicature.