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Embedded Implicatures and Experimental Constraints: A Reply to Geurts & Pouscoulous and Chemla

Paper · 2010 · Uli Sauerland

Summary

Sauerland responds to two experimental studies on embedded implicatures, Geurts & Pouscoulous (2009a, "G&P") and Chemla (2009b, "C"). He argues that their data have narrower theoretical consequences than the authors claim. The experiments do refute obligatory local implicature computation, the strong localism of Levinson (2000) and Chierchia (2004), but that view was already doubtful on intuitive grounds.

The paper applies the pragmatic principle of Truth Dominance (Meyer & Sauerland 2009). It states that when an ambiguous sentence is true on its most accessible reading, hearers judge it true. Under Fox's (2007) grammatical Exh operator, the local+global reading entails the global-only reading, so the stronger reading can never surface in truth-value judgments. G&P's results therefore fit optional local computation ("Minimal Conventionalism") equally well.

Sauerland considers C's finding about free-choice inferences more significant. These inferences behave differently from ordinary scalar implicatures when embedded. He also argues that embedded speech acts cannot explain every embedded implicature. Truth-value tasks alone cannot settle the question. Future work should compare the content of embedded and matrix implicatures.

Key points

  • The target is strict localism (Levinson 2000; Chierchia 2004), where local implicatures always arise unless cancelled. Examples like a three-way disjunction of problems show this predicts readings nobody actually gets.
  • Fox's (2007) Exh operator depends on a contextual alternative set C and the notion of "innocent excludability". It allows implicatures to be computed locally or only globally.
  • Truth Dominance comes from Meyer & Sauerland (2009) and is related to Abusch (1994) and to the "Charity" principle of Gualmini et al. (2008). It also explains why the German sentence Nur Maria liebt jeder seems to lack one of its scope readings.
  • C reports that free-choice inferences, unlike scalar implicatures, survive under a universal quantifier. C also finds they are not detachable: two logically equivalent negated modal sentences differ in whether the inference appears.
  • Sauerland argues against the embedded speech-act account of Geurts & Pouscoulous (2009b):
    • A sentence stating that the majority of students have permission for A or B still appears to yield embedded free choice.
    • Yet Krifka (2001) says most blocks embedded speech acts, so the speech-act account cannot produce that reading.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. If one reading of an ambiguous sentence entails another, truth-judgment data can never reveal the stronger one, so absence of evidence for that reading tells you nothing.
  • I2. Treat the implicature mechanism as an optional operator (Exh) placed at different points in the structure, which yields an explicit set of candidate readings rather than a single default.
  • I3. Add a separate selection principle on top of the generated readings, preferring the reading under which the sentence comes out true, as cooperative interpretation suggests.
  • I4. Embedded local implicatures are mostly "repairs": they get added when the plain meaning would be contradictory or redundant (e.g., A or B or both).
  • I5. To decide whether two inference types share a mechanism, test whether their content and embedding behaviour match, for example by checking whether they survive under every or most, or whether they disappear under logically equivalent paraphrases.

For Mova

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

  • I1 (learn): When evaluating implicature or scope choices against human or LLM-teacher judgments, flag entailment-related reading pairs as undetectable instead of counting them as errors or confirmations.
  • I2 (frames): crate prag could attach Exh candidates at clause or quantifier nodes of the UD tree and keep each resulting reading as a traceable alternative.
  • I3 (world): When several readings compete against the text's world state, choose the one that makes the speaker's claim true and record that this charity rule decided it.
  • I4 (frames): Trigger local scalar strengthening only when the unstrengthened frame is contradictory or redundant, which gives an explainable condition instead of always-on enrichment.
  • I5 (learn): Build minimal-pair negative-control sets (equivalent paraphrases, different quantifiers) to check whether prag's free-choice and scalar rules generalise consistently.

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

🔬Leibniz-Centre General LinguisticsBerlin · Germany7 works · 78 citations

Also on the byline: University of Wuppertal.

 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 Uli Sauerland. 2010. Embedded Implicatures and Experimental Constraints: A Reply to Geurts & Pouscoulous and Chemla. Semantics and Pragmatics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3765/sp.3.2

@article{sauerland2010embedded,
  title = {{Embedded Implicatures and Experimental Constraints: A Reply to Geurts \& Pouscoulous and Chemla}},
  author = {Uli Sauerland},
  journal = {Semantics and Pragmatics},
  year = {2010},
  doi = {10.3765/sp.3.2},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.3.2}
}

References

28 references, 2 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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  2. Bezuidenhout, Anne, Robin Morris & Cintia Widman. 2009. The DE-blocking hypothesis: The role of grammar in scalar reasoning. In Sauerland & Yatsushiro (2009), 124–144. find
  3. Büring, Daniel & Katharina Hartmann. 2001. The syntax and semantics of focus-sensitive particles in German. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 19(2). 229–281. doi:10.1023/A:1010653115493. ↗
  4. Chemla, Emmanuel. 2009a. An experimental approach to adverbial modification. In Sauerland & Yatsushiro (2009), 249–263. find
  5. Chemla, Emmanuel. 2009b. Universal implicatures and free choice effects: Experimental data. Semantics and Pragmatics 2(2). 1–33. doi:10.3765/sp.2.2. ↗
  6. Chierchia, Gennaro. 2004. Scalar implicatures, polarity phenomena, and the syntax/pragmatics interface. In Adriana Belletti (ed.), Structures and beyond, 39–103. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ↗
  7. Chierchia, Gennaro, Benjamin Spector & Danny Fox. 2008. The grammatical view of scalar implicatures and the relationship between semantics and pragmatics. find
  8. Ms, to appear in Maienborn, Claudia, Klaus von Heusinger, and Paul Portner (eds.) Handbook of Semantics. Fox, Danny. 2007. Too many alternatives: Density, symmetry and other predicaments. Semantics and Linguistic Theory 17. doi:1813/11295. find
  9. Geurts, Bart. 2009. Scalar implicature and local pragmatics. Mind and Language 24(1). 51–79. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0017.2008.01353.x. ↗
  10. Geurts, Bart & Nausicaa Pouscoulous. 2009a. Embedded implicatures?!? Semantics and Pragmatics 2(4). 1–34. doi:10.3765/sp.2.4. ↗
  11. Geurts, Bart & Nausicaa Pouscoulous. 2009b. Free choice for all: a response to Emmanuel Chemla. Semantics and Pragmatics 2(5). 1–10. doi:10.3765/sp.2.5. ↗
  12. Grice, Paul. 1989. Studies in the way of words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. find
  13. Gualmini, Andrea, Sarah Hulsey, Valentine Hacquard & Danny Fox. 2008. The Uli Sauerland question-answer requirement for scope assignment. Natural Language Semantics 16(3). 205–237. doi:10.1007/s11050-008-9029-z. ↗
  14. Horn, Laurence R. 1985. Metalinguistic negation and pragmatic ambiguity. Language 61(1). 121–174. ↗
  15. Huddleston, Rodney. 1973. Embedded performatives. Linguistic Inquiry 4(4). 539–541. find
  16. Kratzer, Angelika & Junko Shimoyama. 2002. Indeterminate pronouns: The view from Japanese. In Yukio Otsu (ed.), Proceedings of the Third Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics, 1–25. Tokyo: Hituzi Syobo. find
  17. Krifka, Manfred. 2001. Quantifying into question acts. Natural Language Semantics 9(1). 1–40. doi:10.1023/A:1017903702063. ↗
  18. Levinson, Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive meanings. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. find
  19. Meyer, Marie-Christine & Uli Sauerland. 2009. A pragmatic constraint on ambiguity detection: A rejoinder to Büring and Hartmann and to Reis. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 27(1). 139–150. doi:10.1007/s11049-008-9060-2. ↗
  20. Reis, Marga. 2005. On the syntax of so-called focus particles in German: a reply to Büring and Hartmann 2001. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 23(2). 459–483. doi:10.1007/s11049-004-0766-5. ↗
  21. Russell, Ben. 2006. Against grammatical computation of scalar implicatures. Journal of Semantics 23(4). 361–382. doi:10.1093/jos/ffl008. ↗
  22. Sauerland, Uli. 2004a. On embedded implicatures. Journal of Cognitive Science 5(1). 107–137. find
  23. Sauerland, Uli. 2004b. Scalar implicatures in complex sentences. Linguistics and Philosophy 27(3). 367–391. doi:10.1023/B:LING.0000023378.71748.db. Sauerland, Uli. submitted. Disjunction and implicatures: Some notes on recent developments. In Chungmin Lee (ed.), Proceedings of the CIL18 workshop on contrastiveness in information structure and/or scalar implicatures. ↗
  24. Sauerland, Uli & Kazuko Yatsushiro (eds.). 2009. Semantics and pragmatics: From experiment to theory. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. find
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  26. Schwarz, Florian, Charles Jr. Clifton & Lyn Frazier. 2008. Strengthening ‘or’: Effects of focus and downward entailing contexts on scalar implicatures. To appear in UMOP 37. find
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  28. Zimmermann, Thomas Ede. 2000. Free choice disjunction and epistemic possibility. Natural Language Semantics 8(4). 255–290. doi:10.1023/A:1011255819284. Uli Sauerland Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Schützenstr. 18 D-10117 Berlin uli@alum.mit.edu ↗

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