Some vs. All, Exact vs. Implied

This week's readings addressed several introductory topics in pragmatics, specifically exploring scalar implicatures and the apparent divide between children and adults' abilities to understand specific types of scales. Stiller's experiments try to avoid the lexical components of pragmatics, instead utilizing pictures to observe the subjects' understanding of scales, while Barner specifically tackles whether children have difficulty comprehending scales that use the quantifiers "some" and "all". Both works contradict absolute claims that children lack the pragmatic abilities of adults, instead demonstrating that children do understand implicatures but fail to recognize some subtle nuances in specific scales.

The basic idea of scalar implicatures is that there are certain weak terms that implicitly negate stronger terms on the same scale. Barner discusses a specific scale consisting of “some” and “all”, and his experiments show that adults interpret “some” to mean “several, but not all”. Interestingly enough, I’m currently enrolled in CS103, which discusses mathematical logic, and we have extensively discussed the distinction between universal and existential statements. These terms discuss properties that apply to all elements of a set and some (at least one) elements of a set respectively, and while these terms differ, they certainly cannot be classified as opposites. I personally don’t know if I would necessarily follow the established trend of negation regarding these specific words if I were to act as a subject in Barner’s experiments. All in all, I found it very intriguing to see that our colloquial use of the term “some” has deviated from its exact and mathematical definition and that this deviation has become well documented in scientific experiments.

Retrospectively, it’s hard for me to think of a moment of time when I understood the distinction between “some” and “all” and how I was able to generate negations and alternatives of a given statement. Funnily enough, even though I am equipped with an exact definition of the word “some”, if I was asked to name some of the letters of the alphabet, I certainly wouldn’t respond by rattling off all 26 characters. Similarly, if I were to tell a friend they could eat some of my candy, I would likely be irked when I realized that they had eaten all of it. Possibly, I would even respond by saying, “I said some, not all of it!” This just goes to show that even though I am cognizant of the exact meaning of the term, I still use it with implied meaning, not expecting to be understood literally.

Lastly, I’m very interested to see if linguists can actually discover the reason behind children’s struggle with certain scales (ie. the one including “some” and “all”) and context-independent statements. Barner states that the nature of formation of scales and the grouping of words into distinct scales remains a rather nebulous topic, which seems odd when they already have solidified a four-step algorithm describing the process in which scales are used to interpret certain statements. Seeing as there is a clear difference in understanding between age groups, my first instinct would be to say that greater comprehension of scales simply arises from more experience with scales and observing the use of such words in everyday life. I believe that these children might be stuck with an exact definition of terms as opposed to an implied one; after all, connotations result from seeing words used in certain contexts over a reasonably long period of time. An experiment that tackles such an issue would likely have to observe several subjects as they continue to grow and develop though, and I think that it might be an immensely difficult task to pin down the exact cause.