Logical or Pragmatic, as Long as it Suits our Convenience: Scalar Inferences in a Pro-and Contra-attitudinal Context

Logical or Pragmatic, as Long as it Suits our Convenience: Scalar Inferences in a Pro-and Contra-attitudinal Context Tom Heyman (tom_heyman123@hotmail.com) Department of Experimental Psychology, 102 Tiensestraat 3000 Leuven, Belgium Walter Schaeken (Walter.Schaeken@ppw.kuleuven.be) Department of Experimental Psychology, 102 Tiensestraat 3000 Leuven, Belgium Katrijn Pipijn (Katrijn.Pipijn@ppw.kuleuven.be) Department of Experimental Psychology, 102 Tiensestraat 3000 Leuven, Belgium Abstract (e.g., ‘all’), it is called a scalar implicature. For instance, when confronted with a sentence like (2), people tend to interpret ‘some countries’ as ‘not all countries’. Although logically, ‘some countries’ could mean ‘all countries’, people rarely take this possibility into account. In the present study we propose a context wherein the endorsement rate of the scalar inference from ‘some’ to ‘not all’ either increases or decreases. It is known that people tend to interpret the quantifier ‘some’ as ‘not all’, though logically some means ‘some and possibly all’. However, we argue that this tendency to derive the scalar inference is variable and depends on the attitude of the reader or listener. When the ‘not all’ interpretation implies a confirmation of one’s attitude, we expect a higher endorsement rate of the inference. On the other hand when the ‘some and possibly all’ interpretation contains pro-attitudinal information, we expect a decrease in endorsement rate. These predictions are derived from Kunda’s theory of motivated reasoning (1990) and are supported by the data. Theoretical implications and suggestions for further research along this line are discussed. Keywords: Scalar inferences; Attitudes; Relevance theory. Motivated The explanation for this tendency can be found in Grice’s cooperative principle (1975, 1989). According to this principle, people should make their contributions such as it is required, when they interact. For that purpose, he proposed four maxims, enabling people to communicate effectively. One of these maxims, the maxim of quantity, states that any contribution to a conversation should be as informative as possible. Returning to the example, if the speaker knows for a fact that all countries are poor, he would have used the stronger quantifier ‘all’. However, the speaker employed the weaker term ‘some’, which is taken to mean that the stronger term is not appropriate (either because the speaker knows that not all countries are poor or because he is unsure that all countries are poor). Looking through the literature, one can find two contradicting opinions concerning the mechanism underlying the production of scalar inferences (Noveck & Reboul, 2008). The neo-gricean account (e.g., Levinson, 2000) assumes that the ‘not all’ interpretation (also called the pragmatic interpretation) is derived by default. A logical interpretation of ‘some’ may be possible, but only when the pragmatic interpretation is cancelled in a certain context. Chierchia (2004) has also proposed a default theory in which he argues that scalar inferences are derived by default except when the scalar term occurs in a downward entailing context. These contexts include negations, question forms and antecedents of conditionals (Noveck & Reboul, 2008). On the other hand, there are theorists who argue against the default character of scalar inferences. Instead, they defend a contextualist view, which comprehends that the narrowing from ‘some’ to ‘not all’ is entirely determined by the context. The best known of these theories is probably Relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986, 1995; Wilson & reasoning; Introduction Understanding utterances requires knowledge about grammar and the semantics of words, but also about non- linguistic properties such as the speaker’s intentions and the context in which the utterance is expressed. The interpretation of utterances has been studied extensively and belongs to pragmatics (Sperber & Wilson, 1986). Within the field of pragmatics one can distinguish different topics such as deixis, presupposition, speech acts, implicatures (Levinson, 1983). However, in the present paper we will only focus on the latter. An implicature, a term introduced by Grice (1975), is what is suggested by an utterance though not explicitly stated nor logically deducible. Consider the following classic example: Some countries are poor. They got married and had a baby. Here, it is suggested that they first got married and then had children (i.e., the implicature), though logically the sequence of events could also be reversed. A lot of research has been devoted to a subclass of implicatures called scalar implicatures. When a weaker term (e.g., ‘some’) is used to imply the negation of a more informative, stronger term