Do people who are very logical find it difficult communicating with other people? Let’s take the example from the Barner, Brook and Bale reading. Say someone says “I ate some cake”. Most adults interpret this as the person eating cake but not all of it. They automatically assume that if the person had eaten all of it, they would say a more informative sentence like “I ate all of the cake”. If we think of this sentence logically, we can’t rule out the possibility of the person having eaten all of the cake. But since, we (most adults) think of it pragmatically, we know that the person hasn’t. This example made me think of the point made in the second paper about rarer features being more informative and hence more likely for a speaker to mention to pick out a referent. Eating a whole cake is more significant than eating a piece of it. Any “whole” is more significant than any “part” and so if someone had eaten a “whole” cake or a “whole” bag of chips, they would think that this would be of significance to the listener and so mention it using the word “all” instead of “some”.
The reason why I have specifically talked about adults is because unlike them, children fail to make scalar implicatures due to their lack of knowledge on relevant scalar alternatives to words like “some”. A reason for this lack of knowledge could be that children have not memorized quantifiers the way they have memorized a count list before having learned any numeral meanings. In interpreting numerals, children have no difficulty and perform as well as adults do but when they come to interpret an utterance containing the word “some”, they might be unaware that their knowledge of “all” is relevant because the two words have not been associated as scalar alternatives.
Now let’s assume that we are trying to think of everything logically rather than pragmatically. So when someone says they ate “some” cake, we are not sure if they had it all or not. Or if someone says “she bought a car or a hat”, we don’t rule out the possibility of her having bought both (so we accept the weak inclusive interpretation of “or”). This interpretation of “or” is logical because as we have seen in set theory, the union of two sets also includes their intersection. So does thinking about utterances very logically and not pragmatically make it hard for the listener to understand what the speaker meant to say?
Hi Naz! It seemed to me that the paper's overall point is that we do not actually think very logically or off of statistics to understand what a speaker meant. Otherwise children would be better at discerning scalar implicature. Instead, it's all about what we have learned throughout life. What do you think?
ReplyDeleteHi Naz,
ReplyDeleteI think that if we think about what someone says logically rather than pragmatically we can easily get confused. Although we are conditioned to think of ourselves as logical, rational beings who think through each piece of information given to us, this understanding of our language processing is ultimately incorrect.
The two readings, in their comparisons of children to adults, reveal that children at first attempt this logical process but fail at discerning the true meaning. This suggests that, when we become adults, we must forego this logical thinking and instead rely on subconscious insight that we have gained from life experience. We do not think logically, but pragmatically. We can only truly understand what another person is saying in many situations if we do rely on these inner pragmatic implicatures.
It seems that logical interpretation of speech could also be a source of cinematic humor. The listener, a highly logical character (say, Spock or Sheldon Cooper) may misunderstand what others mean because he or she interprets it logically. This contradicts the audience's pragmatic interpretation and expectations, thereby generating humor.
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