Logical and Pragmatic Meaning in the Interpretation of Connectives: Scalar Implicatures and “Shallow” Processing

TL;DRAbstract

On one prominent view, endorsed by several authors pursuing neo-Gricean approaches, scalar implicatures like "but not both" in the exclusive interpretation of the conjunction or "A or B but not both," are generated automatically by default in the absence of context.By contrast, the contextualist view holds that scalar implicatures arise only when licensed by the context.We addressed this dispute by performing a sentence-picture verification task experiment, comparing the processing of two connectives in Hungarian: és ("and") and vagy ("or").Crucially, the verification task required only a shallow processing of the meaning of target sentences.The results suggest that in such a task, while the entailment of the connective and was computed automatically, the implicature of or was not activated.This finding speaks against defaultism, and favors contextualist approaches to generalized conversational implicatures.

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