Processing inferences at the semantics/pragmatics frontier: disjunctions and free choice.
Linguistic inferences have traditionally been studied and categorized in several categories, such as entailments, implicatures or presuppositions. This typology is mostly based on traditional linguistic means, such as introspective judgments about phrases occurring in different constructions, in different conversational contexts. More recently, the processing properties of these inferences have also been studied (see, e.g., recent work showing that scalar implicatures is a costly phenomenon). Our focus is on free choice permission, a phenomenon by which conjunctive inferences are unexpectedly added to disjunctive sentences. For instance, a sentence such as "Mary is allowed to eat an ice-cream or a cake" is normally understood as granting permission both for eating an ice-cream and for eating a cake. We provide data from four processing studies, which show that, contrary to arguments coming from the theoretical literature, free choice inferences are different from scalar implicatures.
['Chemla|Emmanuel|E|', 'Bott|Lewis|L|']
D002755:Choice Behavior D032882:Comprehension D005260:Female D006801:Humans D008297:Male D011578:Psycholinguistics D012660:Semantics D055815:Young Adult
Processing Inferences Pragmatics Free choice Scalar implicatures