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Scalar Implicatures Versus Presuppositions: The View from Acquisition

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Abstract

This paper reports an experimental investigation of presuppositions and scalar implicatures in language acquisition. Recent proposals (Chemla 2009; Romoli 2012, Romoli in J Semant 1–47, 2014) posit the same mechanisms for generating both types of inferences, in contrast to the traditional view. We used a Covered Box picture selection task to compare the interpretations assigned by two groups of children (4/5 and 7 year olds) and by adults, in response to sentences with presuppositions and ones with either ‘direct’ or ‘indirect’ scalar implicatures. The main finding was that the behavior of children and adults differed across inference types. This asymmetry is consistent with the traditional perspective, but poses a challenge for the more recent uniform accounts. We discuss how the latter could be amended to account for these findings, and also relate the findings to previous results on presupposition processing. Finally, we discuss an unexpected difference found between direct and indirect scalar implicatures.

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Notes

  1. Schwarz et al. (2014) show that, despite these initial interpretations, it is not clear that these processing results do actually support making a distinction between presuppositions and scalar implicatures.

  2. Notice that accounts like Schlenker’s (2008), who essentially treat presuppositions as manner implicatures, would also fit in the ‘traditional perspective’ in that they do not equate presuppositions with scalar implicatures. An interesting way of testing the prediction of Schlenker’s theory would be to look at children and adults’ behavior with manner implicatures in comparison to presuppositions. We leave this for future research.

  3. See also (Beaver and Geurts 2012), Schwarz (2015), and Romoli and Sauerland (to appear), for an introduction to presuppositions.

  4. The projection behavior is not limited to negation, but is a general pattern involving all sorts of complex embeddings. For instance, the presupposition of (4a) is inherited also by conditional sentences containing (4a) in their antecedent, questions, or modal sentences embedding (4a): all of (1)–(3) give rise to the inference that the bear participated in the race.

    1. (1)

      If the bear won the race, he will celebrate.

    2. (2)

      Did the bear win the race?

    3. (3)

      The bear might have won the race.

  5. The distinction between DSIs and ISIs can be roughly defined as follows: a DSI involves the interpretation of a weak scalar term in an upward entailing context, whereas an ISI involves a strong scalar term in a downward entailing contexts, such as the scope of negation.

  6. Notice that among the mentioned accounts, that by Abusch (2002, 2010) is perhaps less associated with the expectation of similarity between presuppositions and scalar implicatures, as she invokes an implicature-based mechanism for (some) presuppositions, that is slightly different from that involved in the computation of scalar implicatures.

  7. Traditional accounts also commonly assume that (16) is an entailment of (15a), though this isn’t necessarily extended to all presupposition triggers (see Sudo (2012) for discussion). Note that (17) might be acceptable in some special sense of ‘winning’ in certain contexts—such as technical victories, assigned without the race ever actually taking place.

  8. See also Chemla and Singh (2014) for a critical review.

  9. We remain neutral as to the source of this different behavior. While it is commonly attributed to children’s inability to generate SIs, it could also be due to a higher tolerance to pragmatic infringements (Katsos and Bishop 2011: a.k.a ‘Pragmatic Tolerance Hypothesis’), or to variation in the type of judgments (e.g., with regards to assessing informativity vs. truth). Although these are interesting questions, it is not necessary for our purposes to settle on a particular answer, so in the interest of terminological consistency we may occasionally describe certain responses as being indicative or not of ‘SI-generation’, even though we are aware of the possibility of alternative interpretations and ongoing discussion in this area.

  10. The covered test picture consisted of a black piece of laminated paper stuck to the poster by tabs of fabric hook and loop fastener (a.k.a ‘Velcro’).

  11. In fact, unbeknown to participants, for the non-training part of the session, there was no actual picture underneath the ‘Covered Picture’.

  12. This paradigm is quite similar to the Truth Value Judgment Task paradigm (Crain and Thornton 1998); however, it arguably differs in a couple of important ways. First, by presenting the option of the ‘unknown’ interpretation, participants are encouraged to actively consider alternative interpretations, which might better suit the test sentence. Second, by requiring participants to choose between two pictures, rather than judging the ‘truth-value’ of a sentence, the possibility of participants accepting the test sentences out of politeness or confusion is reduced.

  13. The examples presented are from one of the trials in the ISI condition. The visible picture for this trial is shown in Fig. 2(b).

  14. There are different versions of this idea: in one version the difficulty is thought to be due to a processing cost that would be associated with holding the alternatives in memory. A different interpretation suggests that children have not acquired yet the relevant knowledge of alternatives altogether. See Barner et al. (2011), Reinhart (2006), Zhou et al. (2013) and Tieu et al. (to appear) for discussion.

  15. See Sect. 3.4 for discussion of the potential additional possibility of local application of a scalar mechanism, parallel to what we describe for presuppositions below. See also Magri (2010), (2011) for a different perspective on cancellation/suspension of scalar implicatures through domain restriction.

  16. We are assuming here a way of thinking about relevance as whatever answers the explicit or implicit question under discussion. See Roberts (1996) and much subsequent work.

  17. This is not entirely accurate for all versions of the traditional approach, but this level of description will be enough for our illustrative purposes here.

  18. This is again parallel to what the traditional perspective assumes about global and local application of the presupposition generating mechanism. Romoli (2014) tries to derive this by appealing to a principle of maximize strength.

  19. Note that this still leaves open why they get them less often for ISIs than for DSIs, but an overall interaction pattern is expected between adults and children based on this line of thought.

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Acknowledgments

For helpful feedback and discussion, we would like to thank Emmanuel Chemla, Gennaro Chierchia, Alexandre Cremers, Lynda Kennedy, Kelly Rombough, Raj Singh, Jesse Snedeker, Ayaka Sugawara, Rosalind Thornton, Lyn Tieu, the audiences at the CUNY2014 and PLC38 conferences, and the members of the CCD Language Acquisition Group at Macquarie University. We would also like to thank Dorothy Ahn for images used in the experimental stimuli.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, 2109, Australia

    Cory Bill

  2. School of Communication, University of Ulster, Belfast, NIR, BT15 1ED, UK

    Jacopo Romoli

  3. Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 19104-6305, USA

    Florian Schwarz

  4. Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, 2109, Australia

    Stephen Crain

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Correspondence to Cory Bill.

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Bill, C., Romoli, J., Schwarz, F. et al. Scalar Implicatures Versus Presuppositions: The View from Acquisition. Topoi 35, 57–71 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-014-9276-1

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