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Conversational Reasoning in the Absence of Quantity

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Selected Reflections in Language, Logic, and Information (ESSLLI 2019)

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Abstract

Fox (2014) argues that cancelling the Maxim of Quantity can minimally dissociate between the pragmatic (primarily neo-Gricean) and grammatical approaches to scalar implicature. Under the pragmatic approach, scalar implicatures only arise as a result of adherence to the maxim of Quantity. The grammatical approach can predict that scalar implicatures remain available, in principle, when Quantity is not a conversational requirement as they arise from mechanisms independent of the maxim of Quantity. The present study operationalizes Fox’s game-show scenario into an experiment in which participants are tasked with determining which items are associated with money. The host, who is reticent about their knowledge, provides partial information (disjunctions and numerals) as hints to help the contestants. Experimental results demonstrated that participants can strengthen the meaning of disjunctions and numerals to help them make judgments about the relevant alternatives. The present work provides experimental evidence for the availability of scalar implicatures in a conversational context where the speaker does not obey the maxim of Quantity.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As noted by an anonymous reviewer, it should be emphasized that the cancellation of Quantity is a theoretical move proposed by Fox and not a guaranteed fact of the game show scenario. The status of the cooperation in strategic conversations, such as the one presented in this paper, is briefly discussed in the conclusion.

  2. 2.

    Note that there is both an implicit and explicit cancellation of Quantity. The maxim of Quantity is contextually cancelled under the presumption that the purpose of the game show is not to simply tell the contestant where the money is, whether the host is aware or not. This is reinforced through explicit cancellation as the host is specifically described to be aware of where the money is and is unwilling to let the contestant know.

  3. 3.

    The exhaustification operator represents the conjunction of two propositions. The first being that what is asserted is true, and the other is that the relevant alternatives that are not entailed by this assertion is false [29, 33]. Note that this is a similar formulation to the strongest meaning hypothesis [8].

  4. 4.

    It should also be noted that some pragmatic theoretical frameworks consider scalar implicatures in numerals to be the result of semantic (grammatical) mechanisms, when they do not otherwise endorse the grammatical exhaustification approach for scalar implicatures. See Geurts and Breheny, respectively, [5, 14] for discussion on the “ambiguity” view and “exactly-one” view.

  5. 5.

    Please note that the analyses presented in this paper were planned in advance as part of the author’s thesis prospectus meeting.

  6. 6.

    Random effects were not included in this analysis to avoid overfitting the data.

  7. 7.

    Note that Attentional pragmatics argues for a similar solution to Hurford’s Constraint as it does for implicature availability when Quantity is cancelled, by considering semantics where “A or B” is not equivalent to “A or B or both” (see Westera [32]).

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Acknowledgments

I would like to express my immense gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Raj Singh, for his fruitful conversations and astute feedback that greatly contributed in developing this work. I would also like to thank the ESSLLI reviewers for their patient and detailed feedback that was instrumental in significantly improving the quality of this research article. All remaining errors are my own.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cognitive Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, K1S 5B6, Canada

    Cathy Agyemang

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  1. Cathy Agyemang
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Correspondence to Cathy Agyemang .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Logic and Computation, TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Alexandra Pavlova

  2. Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Mina Young Pedersen

  3. University of Trento, Rovereto, Italy

    Raffaella Bernardi

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Agyemang, C. (2024). Conversational Reasoning in the Absence of Quantity. In: Pavlova, A., Pedersen, M.Y., Bernardi, R. (eds) Selected Reflections in Language, Logic, and Information. ESSLLI 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14354. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50628-4_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50628-4_1

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