Embedded implicature: what can be left unsaid?
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Embedded implicature: what can be left unsaid? Anton Benz1
· Nicole Gotzner1
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Previous research on scalar implicature has primarily relied on meta-linguistic judgment tasks and found varying rates of such inferences depending on the nature of the task and contextual manipulations. This paper introduces a novel interactive paradigm involving both a production and a comprehension side and a precise conversational goal. The main research question is what is reliably communicated by some in this communicative setting, both when the quantifier occurs in unembedded and embedded positions. Our new paradigm involves an action-based task from which participants’ interpretation of utterances can be inferred. It incorporates a game-theoretic design, thereby including a precise model to predict participants’ behaviour in the experimental context. Our study shows that embedded and unembedded implicatures are reliably communicated by some. We propose two cognitive principles that describe what can be left unsaid. In our experimental context, a production strategy based on these principles is more efficient (with equal communicative success but shorter utterances) than a strategy based on literal descriptions. Keywords Scalar implicature · Embedded implicature · Experimental pragmatics · Game theoretic pragmatics
This work was supported by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) (Grant Nr. 01UG1411), and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Grant Nr. BE 4348/4-1 and 4-2, as part of the priority program New Pragmatic Theories based on Experimental Evidence (SPP 1727). We are grateful to Lisa Raithel for programming the system for the experiments.
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Anton Benz [email protected] Nicole Gotzner [email protected]
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Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS), Schützenstrasse 18, 10117 Berlin, Germany
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A. Benz, N. Gotzner
1 Introduction Grice (1975) distinguished between two components of communicated meaning: what is said and what is implicated. The first component is the content that is semantically expressed by an utterance, and the second component is the content that is pragmatically inferred from the assumption that the speaker is cooperative and follows certain maxims. For example, if Kate is a girl who has to clean up her room and find all of her marbles with which she had played before, then, if one parent is asked ‘How many of her marbles did Kate find?’, the answer ‘Kate found some of her marbles’ would clearly communicate that she did not find all of them. Literally, the answer only states that Kate found some and possibly all of them. The proposition that Kate did not find all has to be inferred from shared contextual and pragmatic knowledge. For Grice, a necessary condition for this proposition to be a conversational implicature is that ‘the speaker thinks (and would expect the hearer to think that the speaker thinks) that it is within the competence of the hearer to work out, or grasp intuitively,’ that it is implied by context and pragmatic principles
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