A study on scalar implicatures and gradable adjectives. - corpora ...

“weak” > “intermediate” > “strong”. For both of these predictions, the contradiction condition serves as
a control baseline.
The Preliminary results from 16 native speakers of Italian are shown in Table 1. Regarding the
acceptability judgment, sentences containing weak adjectives are rated significantly lower than those
with intermediate and strong adjectives (all ps.5). This suggests that SI calculations were not immediately
available to people when they first encounter the SI triggers. This supports the view that SI processing,
being pragmatic in nature, is a delayed process.
Table 1 Acceptability judgment response and RT results (n=16)
Condition
Weak Intermediate Strong Contradictory
Response (1-5) 3.15 4.13 4.24 1.50
Response time 3602.0 3766.4 3296.4 2572.8
(ms)
RT at the CW
(ms)
649.4 659.4 669.2 739.9
Reference
[1] Horn, Laurence. 1984. "A new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q-based and R-based
implicature." In D. Schiffrin (ed.), Meaning, Form and Use in Context (GURT '84), 11-42.
[2] Doran, Ryan, Rachel Baker, Yaron McNabb, Meredith Larson, and Gregory Ward, 2008,“On the
Non-Unified Nature of Scalar Implicature: An Empirical Investigation,” in International Review of
Pragmatics 1:1-38.
[3] Bott, L. & Noveck, I.A. (2004). Some utterances are underinformative: The onset and time course
of scalar inferences. Journal of Memory and Language, 51(3), 437-457.
[4] Nieuwland, M.; Ditman, T. & Kuperberg, G. 2010. On the incrementality of pragmatic processing:
An ERP investigation of informativeness and pragmatic abilities. Journal of Memory and Language.
63:324-346.