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During communication, the interpretation of utterances is sensitive to a listener's probabilistic prior beliefs. In this paper, we focus on the influence of prior beliefs on so‐called exhaustivity interpretations, whereby a sentence such as Mary came is understood to mean that only Mary came. Two theoretical origins for exhaustivity effects have been proposed in the previous literature. On the one hand are perspectives that view these inferences as the result of a purely pragmatic process (as in the classical Gricean view, and more recent Bayesian approaches); on the other hand are proposals that treat them as the result of an encapsulated semantic mechanism (Chierchia, Fox & Spector 2012). We gain traction on adjudicating between these two approaches with new theoretical and experimental evidence, focusing on the behavior of different models for exhaustivity effects, all of which fit under the Rational Speech Act modeling framework (RSA, Frank & Goodman, 2012). Some (but not all!) of these models include an encapsulated semantic mechanism. Theoretically, we demonstrate that many RSA models predict not only exhaustivity, but also anti‐exhaustivity, whereby "Mary came" would convey that Mary and someone else came. We evaluate these models against data obtained in a new study which tested the effects of prior beliefs on both production and comprehension, improving on previous empirical work. We find that the models which have the best fit to human behavior include an encapsulated exhaustivity mechanism. We conclude that, on the one hand, in the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics, semantics plays a larger role than is often thought, but, on the other hand, the tradeoff between informativity and cost which characterizes all RSA models does play a central role for genuine pragmatic effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We show that the interpretation of sentences like John is not very Adj depends on whether Adj is vague. We argue that this follows from a constraint on the interaction between vagueness and conversational implicature, a domain that has not been studied extensively. The constraint states that implicatures are not drawn if they lead to "borderline contradictions" (see Ripley 2011 ; Alxatib & Pelletier 2011 ; a.o.), a natural extension of the idea that implicatures should not contradict assertions (Hackl 2006 ; Fox 2007 ; a.o.). Experiment 1 establishes that not very Adj gives rise to the implicature Adj for the non-vague absolute adjective late, but not for the vague relative adjective tall (in the terminology of Kennedy & McNally 2005a). Experiment 2 generalizes this result to three relative adjectives in the positive form (tall, hot, fast), against those same adjectives in their (non-vague) comparative forms (taller / hotter / faster than the average X). We also constructed quantitative meaning representations for complex predicates of the form Adj |$ \wedge \neg $| very Adj, using fuzzy logic to model the contribution of boolean connectives and our experimental data to represent the meanings of adjectives. The results of these analyses suggest that strengthening not very Adj with Adj leads to a more contradictory interpretation when Adj is vague than when it is not, as expected on our theory. While our results apply directly to only a specific set of lexical items, we hypothesize that they reflect a more general pattern among gradable predicates. This motivates more systematic investigation into the role that vagueness can play in the derivation of conversational implicatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Questions, just like plain declarative sentences, can give rise to multiple interpretations. As discussed by Spector & Egré (2015), among others, questions embedded underknoware ambiguous betweenweakly exhaustive(WE),intermediate exhaustive(IE), andstrongly exhaustive(SE) interpretations (for experimental evidence of this ambiguity, see Cremers & Chemla 2016). These three interpretations are related in terms of strength. The SE reading entails both the IE and WE readings, and the IE reading entails the WE reading. Certain proposals derive the stronger readings from weaker ones through the same process of enrichment that underlies scalar implicatures, in particular through comparison with alternatives (Klinedinst & Rothschild 2011). Given previous developmental studies of scalar implicatures that suggest children typically perform this enrichment less often than adults do (Noveck 2001; Chierchia et al. 2001; Papafragou & Musolino 2003, among many others), such proposals lead us to expect that children may initially prefer weak readings of embedded questions. The present study revealed that 5-year-olds were sensitive to the multiple readings of questions embedded undersavoir‘know.’ Compared to adults, however, children were more tolerant of weak readings. These findings relate scalar implicatures and exhaustive readings of embedded questions from a developmental perspective and are consistent with a close connection between the two: in both cases, children are sensitive to the various possible interpretations but favor the weaker one more than adults do. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What is the semantic content of a question? As pointed out by Karttunen (1977), declarative sentences that embed interrogative complements (such as 'John knows which students called') can provide relatively easy access to the semantics of questions. Recent theories attribute different readings to such sentences and their predictions depend in various ways on the embedding verb ('know' in this example). Through a series of four experiments, we provide quantitative offline data to evaluate critical judgments from the literature. We show that the so-called strongly exhaustive reading is not the only available reading for 'know', providing an argument against approaches inspired by Groenendijk & Stokhof (1982, 1984). We also describe processing data which may further constrain theories, provided hypotheses about the derivation processes are made explicit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]