Michael Franke

Although it is often assumed that the natural language expressions 'some' and 'or' are interpreted according to their first-order logic counterparts, in certain contexts, they receive a narrower interpretation: 'some' is strengthened to 'some, but not all', and 'or' to 'A or B, but not both'. This process is typically explained as an instance of scalar inference. To test this scalar implicature hypothesis, we collect experimental evidence for the effects and interactions of three factors that should affect the robustness of the scalar inferences of 'some' and 'or': the relevance of the stronger alternative, the speaker's competence about the alternative, and the prior probability that the alternative is true. We find that the interpretation of both triggers was affected by speaker competence, but only 'some' was also affected by prior probability, while relevance did not affect either trigger. Ultimately, our results suggest that the interdependence of the three factors is more complex than just the sum of their effects.

Significance: Theoretical linguistics postulates abstract structures that successfully explain key aspects of language. However, the precise relation between abstract theoretical ideas and empirical data from language use is not always apparent. Here, we propose to empirically test abstract semantic theories through the lens of probabilistic pragmatic modeling. We consider the historically important case of quantity words (e.g., “some,” “all”). Data from a large-scale production study seem to suggest that quantity words are understood via prototypes. But based on statistical and empirical model comparison, we show that a probabilistic pragmatic model that embeds a strict truth-conditional notion of meaning explains the data just as well as a model that encodes prototypes into the meaning of quantity words.

The present study investigated how listeners understand and process the definite and the indefinite determiner. While the definite determiner clearly conveys a uniqueness presupposition, the status of the anti-uniqueness inference associated with the indefinite determiner is less clear. In a forced choice production task, we observed that participants make use of the information about number usually associated with the two determiners to convey a message. In a subsequent mouse-tracking task, participants had to select one of two potential referents presented on screen according to an auditorily presented stimulus sentence. The data revealed that participants use the information about uniqueness or anti-uniqueness encoded in determiners to disambiguate sentence meaning as early as possible, but only when they are exclusively faced with felicitous uses of determiners.

Conversation is often cast as a cooperative effort, and some aspects of it, such as implicatures, have been claimed to depend on an assumption of cooperation (Grice, 1989). But any systematic class of inference derived from assumptions of cooperation, such as implicatures, could also be, on occasion, used to deceive listeners strategically. Here, we explore the extent to which speakers might choose different kinds of implicature triggers in an uncooperative game of communication. Concretely, we present a study in the form of a cooperative or competitive signaling game where communicators can exploit three kinds of implicatures: exact reading of numeral expressions, scalar implicatures linked to the quantifiersomeandad hocscalar implicatures. We compare how these implicatures are used depending on whether the participants' co‐player is cooperative, a strategic opponent, or a non‐strategic opponent. We find that when the strategy of the co‐player is clear to the participants, the three types of implicatures are used to exploit the co‐player's interpretation strategy. Indeed, participants use numeral implicatures as reliably as truth conditional content in all three conditions, while scalar quantifiers andad hocimplicature elicit different strategies. We interpret these findings as evidence that speakers expect their interlocutors to infer implicatures from their utterances even in contexts where they know that they will be perceived as uncooperative.

Signalling games are popular models for studying the evolution of meaning, but typical approaches do not incorporate vagueness as a feature of successful signalling. Complementing recent li...

Certain uses of vague quantifiers few and many intuitively compare a true quantity to a priori expectations about that quantity. A concrete proposal for the truth conditions of such readings stipulates a contextually-stable threshold on a contextually-variable representation of a priori expectations (Clark, H. H. 1991. Words, the world, and their possibilities. In Lockhead G. R. & Pomerantz J. R. (eds.), The perception of structure: Essays in honor of Wendell R Garner, 263–277. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association; Fernando, T. & H. Kamp. 1996. Expecting many. In Galloway T. & Spence J. (eds.), Proceedings of SALT VI, 53–68. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.) The main goal of this paper is to introduce data-driven computational modeling as a means to implement and test complex semantic theories of this kind, which may be hard to assess based on solitary introspection of meaning intuitions. Based on an empirical measure of a priori expectations, we use Bayesian inference to estimate likely values of the latent threshold parameters given empirical data from production and comprehension tasks. We demonstrate how posterior inference and statistical model comparison can help assess the plausibility of the fixed threshold hypothesis.

The scalar item some is widely assumed to receive a meaning enrichment to some but not all if it occurs in matrix position. The question under which circumstances this enrichment can occur in certain embedded positions plays an important role in deciding how to delineate semantics and pragmatics. We present new experimental data that bear on this theoretical issue. In distinction to previous experimental approaches, we presented sentence material auditorily in order to explicitly control prosodic markedness of the scalar item. Moreover, our experiment sheds light on the relative preferences or salience of candidate readings. The presented data turn out to be unexpected under a traditional Gricean view, but also challenge the idea of disambiguation by logical strength in grammaticalist approaches.