Scalar Implicatures

I thought these readings on scalar implicature were especially interesting because it made me realize certain nuances of language that had not yet crossed my mind. In both papers, they analyzed the relationship between some and all and in the Barner paper, they explained that children and adults could have different interpretations of sentences that use these words and that a child’s “knowledge of scalar alternatives places a significant constraint on their ability to compute scalar implicatures”. This goes to possibly show that the child’s lack of knowledge is what is what is hindering their ability to successfully perform scalar implicatures.  

What interested me the most was that, as adults, scalar implicatures are so prevalent when conversing or reading that they come almost unconsciously, so much so that it can lead us to alter the meaning of certain words. For example, some always applies when all does, therefore a sentence like “Ryan ate some of the cake” could mean that Ryan ate a portion of the cake, or that he ate all of it. This is logically true, however because it would violate Grice’s maxim of quantity, there is likely never going to be a situation in which someone will say “Ryan ate some of the cake” when he actually ate all of it. Back to my original thought, because of this, I never, and I think most people don’t, interpret some as a subset of all. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if someone ate some of the cake, they did not eat all of it. My definition of some has been altered by the influence of scalar implicatures.

Of the three experiments in the Stiller paper, the final one stuck out to me. What we consider to be ‘normal’ is really only what society considers to be normal. There is no concrete line that separates the normal from abnormal, it is constantly changing depending on the decade and geographical location. Because of this, when describing someone or something, we are by nature not going to provide the descriptions of their normalcies, but their abnormalities. This was shown with the “top hat” experiment, and led Stiller to the conclusion that inferences are made by a wide range of world knowledge and not just by linguistic alternatives. “Pragmatic computations operate over our knowledge about the world, our knowledge of language, and our knowledge of other people”. This somewhat relates to our problem set in which we had to listen to the audio file and write down what comes to mind. Each student made several pragmatic computations while listening to the lady speak: who she was, what kind of person she is, her background, etc. and this was made possible by much more than just our linguistic knowledge.