Experimental investigations on implicatures: a window into the semantics/pragmatics interface

Abstract

It is traditionally assumed in the linguistic-pragmatic literature that Scalar Implicatures (A or B >> either A or B but not both; some of the Fs>> at least one but not all of the Fs) are explicitly defeasible, structure-dependent and defeasible in context. We present three off-line studies that demonstrate the psycholinguistic reality of these properties of Scalar Implicatures (henceforth SIs). We then present two on-line text comprehension experiments that investigate the time-course of generating SIs and support a pragmatic account of SIs, according to which SIs are generated only when both structural and contextual constraints license them. We aim to demonstrate how an experimental approach can be informative on core issues in the semantics/pragmatics literature.