31. Do children derive exact meanings pragmatically? Evidence from a dual morphology languageFranc Marušič, Rok Žaucer, Amanda Saksida, Jessica Sullivan, Dimitrios Skordos, Longlong Wang, David Barner, 2021, original scientific article Abstract: Number words allow us to describe exact quantities like sixty-three and (exactly) one. How do we derive exact interpretations? By some views, these words are lexically exact, and are therefore unlike other grammatical forms in language. Other theories, however, argue that numbers are not special and that their exact interpretation arises from pragmatic enrichment, rather than lexically. For example, the word one may gain its exact interpretation because the presence of the immediate successor two licenses the pragmatic inference that one implies “one, and not two”. To investigate the possible role of pragmatic enrichment in the development of exact representations, we looked outside the test case of number to grammatical morphological markers of quantity. In particular, we asked whether children can derive an exact interpretation of singular noun phrases (e.g., “a button”) when their language features an immediate “successor” that encodes sets of two. To do this, we used a series of tasks to compare English-speaking children who have only singular and plural morphology to Slovenian-speaking children who have singular and plural forms, but also dual morphology, that is used when describing sets of two. Replicating previous work, we found that English-speaking preschoolers failed to enrich their interpretation of the singular and did not treat it as exact. New to the present study, we found that 4- and 5-year-old Slovenian-speakers who comprehended the dual treated the singular form as exact, while younger Slovenian children who were still learning the dual did not, providing evidence that young children may derive exact meanings pragmatically.
Keywords: Acquisition of quantity expressions, Acquisition of exactness, Pragmatics of grammatical number, Inferences on quantity, Dual, Slovenian
Published in RUNG: 13.12.2020; Views: 1987; Downloads: 0
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32. Editorial: Scalar ImplicaturesAnne Reboul, Penka Stateva, 2019, short scientific article Abstract: In 1975, Grice introduced the notion of implicature, arguing that it was more appropriate to account for a class of apparent lexical ambiguities through pragmatic processes than by multiplying lexical meanings (Modified Ockham's razor: Do not multiply meanings beyond necessity; Grice, 1975). For the past 20 years, experimental approaches have superseded purely theoretical ones, with mixed results. Paradigms using verification tasks on infelicitous sentences, with rate of pragmatic answers and reaction time as measures, have generally concluded in favor of the post-Gricean views (Bott and Noveck, 2004; Noveck and Reboul, 2008). However, some recent studies discuss additional factors affecting implicature processing and have introduced new paradigms which suggest a different conclusion (Katsos and Bishop, 2011; Breheny et al., 2013; Degen and Tanenhaus, 2015; Foppolo and Marelli, 2017; Bill et al.; Jasbi et al.; Sikos et al.). In addition, current research has shown that lexical scales may play a role in the process in keeping with neo-Gricean views. This Frontiers topic is a collection of 12 contributions in experimental pragmatics focusing on different aspects of child and adult processing of implicatures, factors affecting their rate, relevance of testing paradigms, scale diversity, cross-linguistic differences, and variation in triggers.
Keywords: scalar implicature, experimental pragmatics, neo-Gricean pragmatics, post-Gricean pragmatics, grammatical theory of implicatures
Published in RUNG: 31.07.2019; Views: 2890; Downloads: 93
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34. Quantifiers and pragmatic enrichmentPenka Stateva, unpublished invited conference lecture Abstract: One of the most studied scales in the literature on scalar implicatures is the quantifier scale. While the truth of 'some' is entailed by the truth of 'all', 'some' is felicitous only when 'all' is false. This opens the possibility that 'some' would be felicitous if, e.g., almost all of the objects in the restriction of the quantifier have the property ascribed by the nuclear scope. This prediction from the standard theory of quantifier interpretation clashes with native speakers’ intuitions. In Experiment 1 we report a questionnaire study on the perception of quantifier meanings in English, French, Slovenian and German which points to a cross-linguistic variation with respect to the perception of numerical bounds of the existential quantifier. In Experiment 2, using a picture choice task, we further examine whether the numerical bound differences correlate with differences in pragmatic interpretations of the quantifier 'some' in English and 'quelques' in French and interpret the results as supporting our hypothesis that 'some' and its cross-linguistic counterparts are subjected to different processes of pragmatic enrichment.
Keywords: quantifier, cross-linguistic variation, experimental pragmatics, picture choice task
Published in RUNG: 15.05.2019; Views: 2754; Downloads: 0
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