Experimentelle Spieltheorie und skalare Implikaturen: kontextuelle Variablen und unterschiedliche Skalentypen.
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
Pragmatics is about language in use, and, in particular, about the emergence of meaning in interaction between speaker and audience. It is a common place that speakers manage to communicate more than they literally say. This ability is what makes natural language efficient. For example, if they want to say ‘Some, but not all marbles are green’, then they can shorten the sentence to ‘Some marbles are green’ and still communicate the same content. The inference from some to ‘some, but not all’ is called an implicature. Explaining implicatures is a core objective of pragmatic theories. A particularly difficult issue is the embeddability of implicatures in logically complex sentences. For example, the embedding of not all in the inference from All girls found some of their marbles to All girls found some, but not all of their marbles. As the literature shows, testing for implicatures of complex sentences poses major methodological problems. Except for a few uncontroversial examples, there was no agreement about what complex sentences implicate, nor was there agreement about the appropriate experimental design for measuring their implicatures. One of the main problems is that implicatures, as pragmatic phenomena, are dependent on such subtle contextual parameters as relevance and expectations about the speaker’s intentions. Game theory allows us to make explicit predictions about the contextual relevance of messages. We therefore developed an experimental paradigm in which pragmatic interpretations are inferred from action choices based on a game theoretic model of the experimental situation. With its help, it was for the first time possible to show that implicatures of logically complex sentences can be communicated with the same reliability as their literal meaning. We introduced two elimination rules that allow simplifying literal descriptions without loosing communicative success. For situations that satisfy strong pragmatic constraints we could show that the sentences defined by these elimination rules cannot be shortened further without losing reliability of communication. The inference from an occurrence of some to the negation of its stronger alternative all is often observed even when it is not supported by pragmatic context. It had been shown that the rate with which it occurs can vary significantly among similar pairs of so-called scale mates (e.g. intelligent/brilliant or warm/hot). The phenomenon is known as scalar diversity. In several experiments with a larger set of adjectival scale mates, we were able to demonstrate correlations and anti-correlations between the rates at which different types of pragmatic inferences occur. We could show, for example, that the rate with which the negation of the stronger scale mate is inferred from the weaker one (scalar implicature: warm, hence not hot) is negatively correlated to the rate with which the negation of the stronger scale mate implicates the negation of the weaker one (negative strengthening: not hot, hence not warm). We also investigated in detail the predictors that explain the variance between different scales. In this, we improved over previous research and were able to draw a much more detailed picture of the factors underlying scalar diversity. In addition to work on the core issues of scalar diversity and implicatures of complex sentences, the project has produced a wide range of results on other related pragmatic issues, including results on the acquisition of implicatures, other inferences from gradable adjectives, and politeness phenomena. Apart from methodological and theoretical improvements, the project produced large data sets that are publicly available.
Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)
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On Bayesian pragmatics and categorical predictions. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, 35(1), 45-55.
Benz, Anton
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Intonation and Pragmatic Enrichment: How Intonation Constrains Ad Hoc Scalar Inferences. Language and Speech, 60(2), 200-223.
Tomlinson, John M.; Gotzner, Nicole & Bott, Lewis
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The Scalar Inferences of Strong Scalar Terms under Negative Quantifiers and Constraints on the Theory of Alternatives. Journal of Semantics, 35(1), 95-126.
Gotzner, Nicole & Romoli, Jacopo
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Adjectival scales and three types of implicature. Semantics and Linguistic Theory, 28(c(2018, 11, 19)), 409.
Gotzner, Nicole; Solt, Stephanie & Benz, Anton
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Scalar Diversity, Negative Strengthening, and Adjectival Semantics. Frontiers in Psychology, 9(c(2018, 9, 12)).
Gotzner, Nicole; Solt, Stephanie & Benz, Anton
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The Best Response Paradigm: A New Approach to Test Implicatures of Complex Sentences. Frontiers in Communication, 2(c(2018, 1, 12)).
Gotzner, Nicole & Benz, Anton
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Choice and prohibition in non-monotonic contexts. Natural Language Semantics, 28(2), 141-174.
Gotzner, Nicole; Romoli, Jacopo & Santorio, Paolo
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Disjunction Triggers Exhaustivity Implicatures in 4- to 5-Year-Olds: Investigating the Role of Access to Alternatives. Journal of Semantics, 37(2), 219-245.
Gotzner, Nicole; Barner, David & Crain, Stephen
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Embedded implicature: what can be left unsaid?. Linguistics and Philosophy, 44(5), 1099-1130.
Benz, Anton & Gotzner, Nicole
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The polarity asymmetry of negative strengthening: dissociating adjectival polarity from facethreatening potential. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 6(1).
Mazzarella, Diana & Gotzner, Nicole
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Implicatures in (non-)monotonic environments. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 26, 340-348
Gotzner, Nicole & Anton Benz
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Romanian 5-year-olds derive global but not local implicatures with quantifiers embedded under epistemic adverbs: Evidence from a shadow play paradigm. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 26, 149-164
Bleotu, Adina Camelia; Anton Benz & Nicole Gotzner
