You're In My Top Five

Both Barner’s “Accessing the unsaid: The role of scalar alternatives in children’s pragmatic inference” and Stiller’s “Ad-hoc scalar implicature in adults and children” explain scalar implicature and the how it differs in usage and comprehension between children and adults. More specifically, Barner concluded that children’s limited knowledge of scalar alternatives places a weighty constraint on their capability to understand scalar implicatures. Similarly, Stiller states that adults and children both rely on real-world knowledge rather than lexical items to compute scalar implicatures. However, since adults obviously have more real-world knowledge and context they succeed more with scalar implicatures.

Scalar implicatures was actually a phenomenon that I noticed two years ago on my own. During my junior year of high school, I was being recruited by five colleges, and every time the coach from a college that was fourth or fifth on my list asked where their college stood in my preferences, I always replied with “top five.” I used this response because I did not want to insult the coaches and they had no idea how many colleges I was looking at, so top five should sound good to them. But after using the same reply so many times I realized they could probably take insult because using the term “top five” implies that they are fourth or fifth. This is because there is a scale quantifier included, as described in Barner, in the expression. If the last two schools were really among my first choices I would have naturally said “top three” instead, but since I wasn’t as specific and chose to say “top five,” it could be derived that they were actually ranked fourth or fifth.

Top three versus top five is a lot like the some versus all situation described in Stiller. Some applies whenever all does just like how there will always be a top three if there’s at least a top five. I was proud that I was able to recognize this scalar implicature on my own, but after reading these passages I realized that I was definitely old enough to spot an implicature like this. I had enough real-world knowledge and a good enough grasp on scalar alternatives during junior year to easily spot it. The late acquisition of scalar implicature reminds me of Carnie when it was stated that when parents corrected a very young child, it didn’t have any tangible effects on their learning. This combined with Stiller and Barner proves that many children have to grow up and experience the world first on their own in order to naturally gain many of these advanced concepts.