Diagnosing truth, interactive sincerity, and depictive sincerity  

Oleh:

Coppock, Elizabeth ; Brochhagen, Thomas

Jenis: Article from Proceeding
Dalam koleksi: Proceedings of the 23rd Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference, held at the University of California, Santa Cruz, May 3 - 5, 2013, page 358–375.
Topik: modi?ed numerals; ignorance implicatures; inquisitive semantics; highlighting; experimental methodology
Fulltext: 3673-7378-1-PB.pdf (659.16KB)

Isi artikel

This paper presents two experimental ?ndings pertaining to the semantics and pragmatics of superlative modi?ers (at least, at most). First, in a scenario with N objects of a given type, speakers consistently judge it true that there are ‘at least N’ and ‘at most N’ objects of that type. This supports the debated position that the ignorance conveyed by superlative modi?ers is an implicature, not an entailment, and contrasts with results obtained using an inference-judgment paradigm, suggesting that truth-value judgment tasks are impervious to certain pragmatic infelicities that inference-judgment tasks are sensitive to. The second ?nding is not predicted by any previous theory: In a scenario with N objects, it is not consistently judged true that there are ‘at most N +1’ objects, even though it is consistently judged true that there are ‘at least N 1’ objects. To explain this, we propose a novel pragmatic principle requiring that the scenario depicted by a sentence must be considered possible by the speaker (the Maxim of Depictive Sincerity). Put together, the two ?ndings show that truth-value judgment tasks are impervious to some aspects of pragmatics, but not all.

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