Acquisition of Relevance implicatures: A case against a Rationality-based account of conversational implicatures  

Oleh:

Verbuk, Anna ; Shultz, Thomas R.

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Pragmatics: An Interdiciplinary Journal of Language Studies vol. 42 no. 8 (Aug. 2010), page 2297–2313.
Topik: Relevance implicature L1 acquisition Rationality Gricean reasoning Language module Question-under-discussion
Fulltext: Verbuk_A.pdf (520.44KB)

Isi artikel

In our L1 acquisition experiment, we tested between the Language-based and Rationalitybased accounts of how Relevance implicatures are computed, and found support for the Language-based account but not the Rationality-based account. While on the Languagebased account (e.g., Horn, 1984; Levinson, 2000), Relevance implicatures are situated within the language module, on the Rationality-based account (Kasher, 1991), they are not situated within the language module, and are interpreted as being derived by Rationalitybased reasoning, which is also instrumental in deriving non-linguistic inferences. We tested children aged 5;1–8;1 on computing Relevance implicatures and nonlinguistic inferences that were parallel in nature. On the Language-based account, children were predicted to perform better on computing non-linguistic inferences than Relevance implicatures that are parallel in nature because in order to compute Relevance implicatures children need to master additional linguistic prerequisites. On the Rationality-based account, children were not predicted to perform better on computing non-linguistic inferences than Relevance implicatures. We found that children performed significantly better on computing non-linguistic inferences than Relevance implicatures, which provided evidence for the Language-based account. We argue that reasoning about language, and specifically, about the role of seemingly irrelevant utterances in discourse, constitutes the main acquisition challenge with respect to Relevance implicatures.

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