Speaker: Ahmed Alhuwayshil (University of Edinburgh/MIT)
Title: Redundant Scalar Implicatures
Time: Thursday, November 12th, 12:30pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: In the long-standing debate around the processing of scalar implicatures (SIs), experimental work has focused on whether scalar implicatures are ‘default’ or ‘contextual’. Defaultism covers possibilities whereby SIs are automatic enrichments of lexical meaning or achieved by the activation of a grammatical exhaustivity operator (Exh). In the experimental literature, contextualism is usually associated with a Relevance Theoretic (RT) approach (Sperber & Wilson 1986) in which SIs arise only if they are germane to current discourse needs. My work focuses on an understudied prediction which distinguishes default from RT accounts. Default accounts predict that SIs arise for listeners even when their content is informationally redundant whereas RT accounts balance an enrichment’s positive cognitive effects against the listener’s processing effort. Using a priming paradigm across three mouse-tracking experiments and one button-press reaction-time experiment, I provide evidence suggesting that SIs are calculated even when they are informationally redundant. I argue that these findings challenge the claims of the RT account and support formal semantic approaches in which exhaustification is triggered by a grammatical exhaustivity operator (Exh) as proposed by Chierchia (2004), Fox (2007) and Chierchia et al. 2012).