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Experimental Perspectives on Presuppositions pp 215–240Cite as

An Experimental Comparison Between Presuppositions and Indirect Scalar Implicatures

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Part of the book series: Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics ((SITP,volume 45))

Abstract

We compare two aspects of meaning, namely the presupposition of stop in the scope of negation (John didn’t stop going to the movies. ↪ John used to go to the movies.) and the scalar implicature associated with the strong scalar item always under negation (didn’t always go to the movies. ↪ John sometimes went to the movies.) (‘Indirect Scalar Implicatures’ (ISIs); Chierchia, Structures and Beyond, 2004). In our results, ISIs are found to pattern with presuppositions in that responses reflecting an interpretation without an inference (corresponding to a ‘literal’ interpretation) are slower than ones based on the relevant inference (Chemla and Bott, Lang Cogn Process, 38:241–260, 2013), contrary to what has been found for direct scalar implicatures (Bott and Noveck, J Mem Lang, 51:437–457, 2004, among others). These results are puzzling from the traditional perspective that ISIs are generated in the same way as direct implicatures. We explore two possible interpretations: first, strong scalar terms could receive a presuppositional analysis as well and presuppose that their domain is non-empty. Alternatively, we could group stop and ISIs together from another angle and see them as obligatory scalar implicatures, in contrast to the non-obligatory direct ones.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The literatures on both topics are vast, so let us just point to recent overviews for further background reading: for scalar implicatures, see Chierchia et al. (2012) and Geurts (2010) and references therein; for presuppositions, see Beaver and Geurts (2012) and references therein.

  2. 2.

    Notice that, strictly speaking, this fact alone does not imply that these inferences could not be part of the literal meaning of one of the possible interpretations of (1a) and (2a), if the latter are considered ambiguous. In fact, some accounts of scalar implicatures and presuppositions do posit some form of ambiguity to account for the optionality just mentioned. As the issue is not relevant for our discussion, we will ignore it here. See Chierchia et al. (2012) for discussion.

  3. 3.

    There are some exceptions, in particular Chemla (Chemla (2009b)) and Romoli (2012), Romoli (Romoli (In press)). We will come back to these alternative approaches in the discussion section below.

  4. 4.

    But see Chemla (Chemla (2009c)) for an offline study involving inferences of the type of (3a). For relevant work on the acquisition of indirect scalar implicatures see Musolino and Lidz (2006) and Katsos et al. (2011). Finally, after finishing this paper, the recent manuscript by Cremers and Chemla (2013) came to our attention. We’ll have to leave a more detailed comparison with this work to another occasion.

  5. 5.

    A possible complication in this regard involves the presence of negation and its potential processing implications. We will return to this briefly below.

  6. 6.

    See Horn (1972); Rooth (1992); Sauerland (2004) among many others. For a more articulate theory of alternatives see Katzir (2007); Fox and Katzir (2011).

  7. 7.

    Notice that the positive polarity nature of sometimes makes (18), if asserted, marginal if not completely infelicitous in its interpretation in which sometimes takes narrow scope with respect to negation. As it is generally implicitly done in the literature, we will assume that this is not a feature that applies to alternatives.

  8. 8.

    In other cases, other considerations enter into the picture, in particular a notion of ‘relevance’ is used, so that if it is clear in the context that the competitor would have not been relevant for the goals of the conversation, the scalar implicature is not derived.

  9. 9.

    In this perspective, the presupposition is said to be ‘accommodated’ in the context (Lewis, 1979); see von Fintel (2008); Beaver and Zeevat (2012) and references therein for further discussion.

  10. 10.

    Notice that this does not mean that presuppositions per se are not associated with a cost. See Schwarz and Tiemann (2013) for discussion and relevant results on the processing of presupposition projection.

  11. 11.

    For those curious about the results, we found no differences between inference and no-inference trials for this sentence type, in contrast with the other two, as discussed below. We have to leave the interpretation of this result for another occasion.

  12. 12.

    These effects were also present when looking only at data from the participants with target choices in the No Inference condition.

  13. 13.

    As with the response data, largely parallel results are also obtained when just looking at the data from participants with target choices in the No Inference condition.

  14. 14.

    For instance, Romoli (2012); Romoli (In press) proposes that some presuppositions are obligatory indirect scalar implicatures and this can account for certain differences with ‘regular’ indirect scalar implicatures. But then, once we distinguish between presuppositions and indirect scalar implicatures in this way, it is not clear anymore that the similarity in processing is expected.

  15. 15.

    Thanks to Danny Fox (p.c.) for suggesting this way of looking at indirect scalar implicatures.

  16. 16.

    We only consider here the weakest competitor as a presupposition. This immediately raises the question as to whether also other intermediate members of the scale, like ‘often’ in this case, should be considered presuppositions. We leave this issue for future research.

  17. 17.

    Notice that, importantly, these results by no means imply that sentences like (38a) do not give rise at all to universal inferences like that in (38c). See Romoli (2012); Romoli (Romoli (In press)) for arguments in favor of the existence of tg inference.

  18. 18.

    To illustrate, consider the following minimal pair from Chierchia (Chierchia (in press)): while (42a) is easily interpreted with an exclusive reading of disjunction (i.e., everyone likes Mary or Sue but not both), this is not the case for (42b). In other words, (42b) is generally interpreted as not suggesting that if someone likes both Mary and Sue, she won’t write to the dean (see Panizza et al. 2009 for discussion and experimental data that show the sensitivity of scalar implicatures to polarity).

    1. (42)

      a. Everyone either likes Mary or likes Sue and will write to the dean.

      b. Everyone who either likes Mary or likes Sue will write to the dean.

  19. 19.

    We do not predict projection inferences, unless we make additional assumptions. See Chemla (Chemla (2009a)); Romoli (2012); Romoli (Romoli (In press)) for scalar implicature-based account of presuppositions, which do make additional assumptions for deriving their projection behavior.

  20. 20.

    See Romoli (2012); Romoli (Romoli (In press)) for arguments in favor of having the inference in (49b) from (49a) and a proposal on how to derive it as a scalar implicature,

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Acknowledgements

For discussion and suggestions, thanks to Cory Bill, Emmanuel Chemla, Gennaro Chierchia, Stephen Crain, Alexandre Cremers, Raj Singh, Benjamin Spector, Yasutada Sudo, and the audience at Sinn und Bedeutung 18 in Vitoria. Thanks to Rachel Stults, Jamie Fisher, and Robert Wilder for assistance with data collection and to Dorothy Ahn for images used in the experimental stimuli. The work reported here was in part supported by a grant from the University Research Foundation of the University of Pennsylvania.

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  1. Room 17E10, School of Communication, University of Ulster, Jordanstown Campus, Shore Road, Newtownabbey, Co. Antrim, BT37 0QB, UK

    Jacopo Romoli

  2. Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, 619 Williams Hall, 255 S. 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA

    Florian Schwarz

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Correspondence to Jacopo Romoli .

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  1. Dept. of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

    Florian Schwarz

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Romoli, J., Schwarz, F. (2015). An Experimental Comparison Between Presuppositions and Indirect Scalar Implicatures. In: Schwarz, F. (eds) Experimental Perspectives on Presuppositions. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 45. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07980-6_10

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