An Experimental Study Of Scalar Implicature From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Scalar implicature, a paradigmatic case of conversational implicature, is traditionally assumed to arise when a speaker's use of a weak term like some is taken to implicate that he/she has reasons not to use the stronger term from the same scale ranked by order of informativeness, i.e. all. As a testing ground of various competing theories, it has aroused intense interest among scholars within the pragmatic field. Ever since the birth of Grice's theory of Conversational Implicature, there have been two major camps arguing about scalar implicature: Neo-Griceans like Horn and Levinson and Post-Griceans such as Sperber and Wislson as well as Carston.Among proposals of these linguists, Relevance Theory endorsed by the post-Griceans (hence relevance theorists) occupies an extremely crucial position thanks to its remarkable explanatory power. According to relevance theorists, scalar implicature is just an ordinary type of pragmatic inference that is drawn on contextual assumptions. Believing―optimal relevance‖is the key concept in explicating pragmatic inference in general (and scalar inference in particular), they maintain that scalar implicature is subject to demands of communicative exchanges, which implies not all weak propositions implicates denial of stronger propositions under any circumstances. Whether a scalar implicature will be generated or not depends on hearer's expectation of relevance (Sperber and Wilson, 1995; Carston, 1998). The present work aims to experimentally test these assumptions by analyzing data collected from a group of 85 M.A. students majoring in English. It is mainly composed of three experiments. The materials are all displayed in the form of a carefully-designed questionnaire. Specifically, participants are asked to evaluate the appropriateness of 30 statements with quantifiers some and all isolated from context (Experiment 1) and 12 similar statements presented with rich context (Experiment 2). They are then invited to show agreement or disagreement with possible interpretations of 3 underinformative sentences in certain envisioned conversational settings (Experiment 3). Their responses are collected and analyzed by using the statistical software SPSS 11.0.Overall, tentative conclusions from the study are that those participants seem quite sensitive to scalar implicature and they are more likely to derive such implicatures when given rich context. But unlike predictions from relevance theorists, these subjects appear to be largely unaware of the non-occurrence of scalar implicature in certain situations. These results, though somewhat unanticipated, have provided partial evidence to relevance theoretical assumptions about scalar implicature on the one hand and supplied useful data for further investigation into scalar implicature within the Chinese English learning context on the other.