On the Roles of Markedness and Contradiction in the Use of Alternatives

Abstract

Scalar implicature (SI) is often viewed as reasoning from what was said to what was left unsaid.* For example, a speaker who utters John has three children can license the SI that John has exactly three children, not four or more. This is often attributed to the fact that, if the speaker had thought that John had more than three children, the speaker could have conveyed this information by saying John has four children . The speaker didn’t, so we conclude that John doesn’t. Taking into account alternative statements that were not used is an attractive idea, but it requires addressing several non-trivial challenges, such as where in the cognitive architecture the relevant reasoning about such unsaid alternatives is performed and how exactly the alternatives are handled. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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