The effects of scalar implicature

The effects of scalar implicature

It is easily understandable that children and adults have a difference pragmatic sense of understanding. The highly studied example of this is present in this week’s readings by Stiller, Goodman and Frank in “Ad-hoc scalar implicature in adults and children” and by Barner, Brooks and Bale in “Accessing the unsaid: The role of scalar alternatives in children’s pragmatic inference.” A scalar implicature is an implicature that is attributed to an implicit meaning beyond the literal meaning of an utterance on a scale.

The overall result of the Barner article is that a scalar implicature such as ‘some’ can affect the contextual meaning of how a sentence in interpreted, because it could theoretically mean ‘all,’ but is not typically the case. Interestingly, there is a situation in which “the world only had a significant effect on how children interpreted sentences involving contextual alternatives, but it had no effect on their interpretation of sentences involving context-independent alternatives” (Barner 92). Therefore, it showcases that children have difficulty being able to interpret the strength of the word ‘some’ on the scale of ‘all.’

It was interesting learning about the psychological and symbolic representations that occur in terms of the processes that adjust the scaling of a word. For example, in the counterfactual theory, it is possible to have a ad-hoc scalar implicatures possible across contexts. However, the linguistic alternative theory suggests that the negation of a feature would not be the same as one with an alternative feature. This reminds me of the Bayesian model where features are updated given new information such as in experiment 3 when the participants were trained, updated their probabilistic models and representations and therefore had stronger pragmatic inferences. I would be interested to learn how this may apply to other contexts and words. In the real world, this is displayed by the complexity between some and all, but adults are able to distinguish and gain a sense of the scaling features. This was an interesting reading, and would love to learn more about the discipline of pragmatics.