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Embedded implicatures?!?

Paper · 2009 · Bart Geurts and Nausicaa Pouscoulous

Summary

The paper asks whether scalar inferences, such as reading "some" as "some but not all," arise freely inside embedded positions. Conventionalist theories predict this. Lexicalist accounts make "some" ambiguous, and syntax-based accounts insert a silent only-like operator, So, at any S-node. The classical Gricean view instead treats such inferences as conversational implicatures computed over whole utterances, so it expects embedded cases to be exceptional. The authors test this with experiments. Participants judged whether premisses with "some" under think, want, have to and all licensed conclusions containing a local "not all" reading. Embedded scalar inferences turned out to be rare. The most plausible candidate was the belief verb think, which the Gricean account can explain on its own terms. The authors also argue that introspection, and task formats that put the inference directly in front of the judge, can exaggerate how often these readings occur. The result matters because it removes the main empirical support for moving implicature into grammar or the lexicon.

Key points

  • The two rival families are conventionalist theories (Landman, Levinson, Chierchia, Fox, Chierchia–Fox–Spector 2008) and Gricean/relevance-theoretic accounts. The paper counts relevance theory as Gricean for its purposes.
  • Syntax-based conventionalism uses a silent So operator that negates stronger alternatives. If So can apply recursively, a sentence has infinitely many parses.
  • Experiments 1a–b paired premisses with candidate conclusions. In one item, for instance, a premiss saying every student had seen a number of Racine's plays was matched with the conclusion that no student had seen every one of Racine's plays. Embedding operators were think, want, have to and all.
  • On a Gricean reading, a universal with embedded "some" yields only "not all … all." The stronger "none … all" would need an implausible extra assumption.
  • Conventionalist evidence such as Chierchia et al.'s salad-or-dessert surcharge example is described as marked and contrastive, so it is not representative.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Weaker "global" readings (not believes all) and stronger "local" readings (believes not all) are distinct, testable outputs, and treating them as separate hypotheses keeps an analysis honest.
  • I2. A theory that generates readings freely must also say which reading is preferred, otherwise it predicts nothing; a ranking principle is part of the theory.
  • I3. Asking judges directly about an inference can itself prompt that inference, so the elicitation format can inflate the phenomenon being measured.
  • I4. Embedding contexts behave differently: think allows local readings more readily than want, modals or all, so the operator matters.
  • I5. Marked contrastive sentences (the "or … but if both" pattern) are poor evidence for general rules and should be tested separately from neutral material.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): prag could generate both the global and local scalar implicature as separate candidate frames, each with its derivation trace, instead of collapsing to one reading.
  • I2 (frames): every implicature rule in prag should come with an explicit preference score and a stated reason, so that ambiguity is resolved explainably.
  • I3 (learn): when LLM teachers label implicatures, pair direct questions with neutral verification prompts and treat the gap as a bias estimate.
  • I4 (frames): store per-embedder licensing flags (attitude verb, desire verb, deontic modal, universal) in the compiled verb classes, and let prag consult them before projecting a local "not all."
  • I5 (answer): build test sets with neutral and contrastive items kept apart, so a reader's implicature accuracy is not inflated by easy marked cases.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University College LondonLondon · United Kingdom88 works · 19,432 citations🎓Radboud University NijmegenNijmegen · Netherlands20 works · 1,688 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 5The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPhilosophy · 284 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Implicature · 138 works

Cite

Cite as Bart Geurts and Nausicaa Pouscoulous. 2009. Embedded implicatures?!?. Semantics and Pragmatics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3765/sp.2.4

@article{geurts2009embedded,
  title = {{Embedded implicatures?!?}},
  author = {Bart Geurts and Nausicaa Pouscoulous},
  journal = {Semantics and Pragmatics},
  year = {2009},
  doi = {10.3765/sp.2.4},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.2.4}
}

References

27 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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