Scalar implicature in adverbial vs. nominal quantifiers: Two experiments
Johanna Alstott
August 2023 

This work experimentally investigates scalar implicature in an understudied domain, adverbial quantifiers ("sometimes," "usually"), and compares scalar implicature in this domain to scalar implicature in nominal quantifiers ("some," "most"). This investigation probes the parallels between adverbial and nominal quantifiers posited in the literature and touches on core questions of which alternatives factor into SI computation. The two experiments use a Degen & Tanenhaus (2015)-inspired "calendar paradigm," in which participants see calendars showing a character's shirts over a two-week period and rate the naturalness of quantified sentences describing the calendars. Experiment 1, in which participants rated only adverbials or only nominals, finds that "some" and "sometimes" have similar scalar implicature profiles, while "most" carries a stronger "not all" inference than "usually" does. Experiment 2 shows that participants rate nominals and adverbials more similarly when they see both. I unify the results of the two experiments by appealing to the different domain specification in the adverbial and nominal stimuli.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007502 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	To appear in Proceedings of CLS 59
keywords:	scalar implicature, alternatives, quantifiers, adverbial quantifiers, q-adverbs, semantics
Downloaded:	387 times

 

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