On the source of distributive inferences
Paul Marty, Sonia Ramotowska, Richard Breheny, Jacopo Romoli, Yasutada Sudo
October 2023 

This paper reports on two experiments investigating the relationship between distributive and negated universal inferences arising from disjunction embedded within a universal quantifier. It has been claimed that distributive inferences can be derived independently from negated universal inferences with nominal, but not with modal quantifiers (Booth 2022, Crnič et al. 2015, Fusco 2015, Sayre-McCord 1986). Experiment 1 tested this claim by comparing cases involving the determiner `every' and cases involving the modal `must', where `must' expressed epistemic necessity. Experiment 2 followed up on Experiment 1 by testing the same two quantifiers, only this time the modal `must' expressed deontic necessity. The results from both experiments show that distributive inferences may arise independently of negated universal inferences with both types of operator. While the findings for `every' essentially replicate those from Crnič et al. 2015, the findings for `must' are new and go against the aforementioned claim. Furthermore, the response time results from both experiments show that distributive inferences are associated with response delay effects in the opposite direction to those generally observed for regular scalar implicatures, raising a new challenge for (some versions of) the implicature-based account of these inferences. We discuss the prospects of non-implicature accounts such as Aloni 2022.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007623 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Submitted
keywords:	distributive inferences, universal modals, scalar implicatures, neglect-zero, response delay effects, pragmatic reasoning, semantics
Downloaded:	375 times

 

[ edit this article | back to article list ]