Embedded scalar diversity

Eszter Ronai (Northwestern University)

This project is an experimental investigation of embedded scalar implicatures in the context of the scalar diversity phenomenon. We test whether a sentence such as “Every student read some of the books” leads to the implicature that “No student read all of the books”, and similarly whether “Every soup was warm” leads to “No soup was hot” — across 42 different lexical scales. We find 1) that embedded implicatures arise (extending prior findings from i.a. Chemla & Spector, 2011; Gotzner & Romoli, 2018); 2) that there is across-scale variation in embedded implicatures, paralleling the scalar diversity phenomenon among global implicatures (i.a. van Tiel, et al., 2016); and 3) that properties of alternatives (semantic distance, boundedness) that predict global scalar diversity predict variation at the embedded level too. It is argued that these findings are most compatible with an account of embedded implicatures that builds on alternatives, such as the grammatical theory (i.a. Chierchia, 2004; Chierchia et al., 2012), a modified neo-Gricean account such as Sauerland (2004), or the “Neo-Gricean uncertainty” version of the Rational Speech Act with Lexical Uncertainty account (Potts et al. 2015). They are, however, less compatible with the “Unconstrained uncertainty” RSA-LU model, which leaves unexplained (without further assumptions) why the same alternative-driven variation should occur both in global and embedded implicatures.