{"pk":26120,"title":"Determining the alternatives for scalar implicature","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Successful communication regularly requires listeners to makepragmatic inferences — enrichments beyond the literal mean-ing of a speaker’s utterance. For example, when interpretinga sentence such as “Alice ate some of the cookies,” listenersroutinely infer that Alice did not eat all of them. A Griceanaccount of this phenomenon assumes the presence of alterna-tives (like “all of the cookies”) with varying degrees of infor-mativity, but it remains an open question precisely what thesealternatives are. To address this question, we collect empiricalmeasurements of speaker and listener judgments about vary-ing sets of alternatives across a range of scales and use these asinputs to a computational model of pragmatic inference. Thisapproach allows us to test hypotheses about how well differ-ent sets of alternatives predict pragmatic judgments by peo-ple. Our findings suggest that comprehenders likely considera broader set of alternatives beyond those logically entailed bythe initial message.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2vj6q5r5","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Benjamin","middle_name":"","last_name":"Peloquin","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Michael","middle_name":"C.","last_name":"Frank","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26120/galley/15756/download/"}]}