| Interaction of Structural and Contextual Constraints During the On-line Generation of Scalar Inferences (2008) | |||||||||||||||
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| We investigate the interaction of structural and contextual constraints on the on-line generation of three types of Scalar Implicature, (a) the disjunction: “A or B ”>> “either A or B but not both”, (b) the partitive NP: “some of the Fs”>> “at least one but not all of the Fs ” and (c) ad hoc context dependent scales. In theoretical linguistics, according to the structural approach (Chierchia, 2004; Levinson 2000) Scalar Implicatures (SIs) are generated whenever certain constraints on the semantic properties of the linguistic structure are satisfied; SIs have to be cancelled subsequently if information from the discourse context indicates that the SI is not felicitous. According to the pragmatic approach, structural properties are a necessary but not sufficient condition, since for SIs to be generated there ought to be further contextual constraints that make the inference relevant (Recanati, 2003; Sperber & Wilson, 1995). The linguistic debate is reflected in the psycholinguistic discussion on the modular versus interactive nature of the human parser. The structural approach presupposes a modular and serial parser and the pragmatic an interactive one which allows multiple constraints to operate from the earliest stage. Recent psycholinguistic studies on SIs are not reaching a consensus. Single sentence truth value judgment tasks (Bott & Noveck, | |||||||||||||||
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