engleski

Pragmatic modeling of quantified expressions

Poor performance on logical tests that include quantified expressions (all, some) has been documented in a number of studies. Pragmatics offers conceptual tools to account for these empirical data in terms of presuppositions or implicatures as additional premises that the participants are usually unaware of. In this study the aim is (1) to analyse the scalar implicatures implied in utterances containing quantifiers ; and (2) to propose a model of speaker's reasoning with quantified expressions. To these ends an eye-tracking experiment with a picture matching task has been set up. The participants' task was to choose the picture that matched the sentence containing quantifiers all and some in all combinations of the Aristotle's square of opposition. The timing of the eye- tracking results shows that the scalar implicature some...are...->some...aren't... is available to the participants from the beginning, i.e. that it is automatically activated, but that the meaning of the quantifier is vague in terms of the number of object that satisfy the condition given in the 'Some...are...' sentence. The results explain the poor performance on logical tests without implying that people are generally bad at logic. The study was funded by the VAAG project of the ESF programme EUROCORES LogiCCC and the Croatian Scientific Foundation.

quantifiers; all; some; reasoning; inferences; pragmatics

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