8/ If Turkey defeats Paraguay (and whatever else needs to happen), good luck to them!
This paper explores how we reason about other people's minds when they make conditional statements, using some super creative methods cooked up by @ebruevcen.bsky.social. TL/DR, the inferences you draw about if>then statements depends crucially on the background knowledge of the speaker.
Children actually CAN compute scalar implicatures & only fail when we proffer "worlds" that invite unintended inferences. Check out new work by @ebruevcen.bsky.social showing early success in a standard TVJ task for both disjunction & some/all & how this totally changes our lab's account of failire.
4/ If the conversation is about what happens if Turkey defeats Paraguay, a consequent-focused QUD, alternatives vary over the consequent (advance, go to tiebreakers, still get eliminated), not other antecedents. Perfection doesn't arise. (Exp 1)
5/ Perfection also depends on speaker knowledge: listeners infer an alternative is false only if they assume the speaker knows its status. A speaker who seems uninformed about, say, what a draw would do won't trigger that inference. (Exp 3)
6/ Our results support an account where Conditional Perfection (CP) arises as a quantity-implicature, via a process of exhaustification over contextually available, QUD-constrained alternatives whose status is known to the speaker.
2/ Which alternatives matter depends on the Question Under Discussion, the conversation that's happening when the conditional gets uttered. Take the hypothetical possibilities football fans run through this World Cup, like my group chat: "If Turkey defeats Paraguay, they advance to the next stage"
7/ This is broadly analogous to scalar implicatures (e.g. "some" implying "not all"), but unlike them, CP doesn't require negating lexically-encoded alternatives.
3/ If the conversation is about what Turkey needs to do to advance, an antecedent-focused QUD, alternative antecedents become relevant: drawing with Paraguay, defeating the US, or Australia defeating the US. The conditional implies these are false, since otherwise they'd have been mentioned. (Exp 1)
New paper w/Alan Bale & @drbarner.bsky.social in Journal of Semantics!🎉 We show in 3 studies that conditionals get strengthened to "only if" depending on listeners' access to alternatives, constrained by QUD & speaker knowledge, paralleling other forms of pragmatic inference. doi.org/10.1093/jos/...
Ebru Evcen
New preprint w/ @drbarner.bsky.social, and probably the most fun project I've worked on!!
Past studies find kids fail to compute scalar implicatures. Do those tasks test spontaneous interpretation, or do they proffer worlds kids would never consider? 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...
