Papers by Salvatore Pistoia-Reda
International Review of Pragmatics, Jan 20, 2021
Acceptable analyticities, i.e. contradictions or tautologies, constitute problematic evidence for... more Acceptable analyticities, i.e. contradictions or tautologies, constitute problematic evidence for the idea that language includes a deductive system. In recent discussion, two accounts have been presented in the literature to explain the available evidence. According to one of the accounts, grammatical analyticities are accessible to the system but a pragmatic strengthening repair mechanism can apply and prevent the structures from being actually interpreted as contradictions or tautologies. The proposed data, however, leaves it open whether other versions of the meaning modulation operation are required. Novel evidence we present argues that a loosening version of the repair mechanism must be available. Our observation concerns acceptable lexical contradictions that cannot be rescued if only a strengthening version of the pragmatic strategy is available.
International Review of Pragmatics, 2021
Acceptable analyticities, i.e. contradictions or tautologies, constitute problematic evidence for... more Acceptable analyticities, i.e. contradictions or tautologies, constitute problematic evidence for the idea that language includes a deductive system. In recent discussion, two accounts have been presented in the literature to explain the available evidence. According to one of the accounts, grammatical analyticities are accessible to the system but a pragmatic strengthening repair mechanism can apply and prevent the structures from being actually interpreted as contradictions or tautologies. The proposed data, however, leaves it open whether other versions of the meaning modulation operation are required. Novel evidence we present argues that a loosening version of the repair mechanism must be available. Our observation concerns acceptable lexical contradictions that cannot be rescued if only a strengthening version of the pragmatic strategy is available.
Natural Language Semantics, 2021
In this paper we focus on the logicality of language, i.e. the idea that the language system cont... more In this paper we focus on the logicality of language, i.e. the idea that the language system contains a deductive device to exclude analytic constructions. Puzzling evidence for the logicality of language comes from acceptable contradictions and tautologies. The standard response in the literature involves assuming that the language system only accesses analyticities that are due to skeletons as opposed to standard logical forms. In this paper we submit evidence in support of alternative accounts of logicality, which reject the stipulation of a natural logic and assume instead the meaning modulation of nonlogical terms.
The present paper presents experimental evidence confirming that contextually mismatching scalar ... more The present paper presents experimental evidence confirming that contextually mismatching scalar implicatures can be generated even when quantifiers range over empty domains. In the literature, this possibility has been interpreted as providing further evidence for a grammatical approach to scalar implicatures. The main result presented here is that scalar sentences with empty domains are judged as more infelicitous when associated with a mismatching implicature than variants with the same empty domains but associated with a non-mismatching implicature. We interpret this result as suggesting that the infelicity judgment associated with the first kind of sentence stems from the cumulative effect of the mismatching implicature and the contextual domain emptiness. Compared to previous literature on blind implicatures, our results indicate that the body of knowledge involved in relevance assignments is restricted to ignoring existential determination while still considering the properties attributed to nonexistent entities. They also show that, while not blocking implicature generation, contextual domain emptiness plays a role in speakers’ evaluation of scalar sentences, reflecting the unconscious nature of scalar implicature generation.
Natural Language Semantics, 2017
In this paper, I defend a grammatical account of scalar implicatures. In particular, I submit new... more In this paper, I defend a grammatical account of scalar implicatures. In particular, I submit new evidence in favor of the contextual blindness principle, assumed in recent versions of the grammatical account. I argue that mismatching scalar implicatures can be generated even when the restrictor of the universal quantifier in a universal alternative is contextually known to be empty. The crucial evidence consists of a hitherto unnoticed oddness asymmetry between formally analogous existential sentences with reference failure NPs. I conclude that the generation of mismatching scalar implicatures does not require contextual access. Keywords scalar implicature; contextual knowledge; oddness; asymmetric entailment "[...] but as we content ourselves with this blind thought and as we do not push far enough the analysis of notions, it happens that unwittingly we fall into the contradiction which the composite idea may imply". G. W. von Leibniz, Meditationes de cognitione, veritate et ideis, 1684 (transl. G.M. Duncan, 1908) * I am grateful to E. Chemla, G. Magri, J. Romoli, U. Sauerland, P. Schlenker and B. Spector for discussions on a previous version of this paper. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for some valuable comments and C. Bartels for her excellent editorial assistance. This work was supported by the Priority Program Xprag.de (SP 1727; SSI: The Strength of Scalar Inference). 1 As stated in the text, the embeddability of scalar implicatures seems incongruous with standard pragmatic accounts, but there are exceptions: for instance, Krifka (2014) places the notion of embedded speech acts at its center, though Krifka as well acknowledges that the possibility of such embedded speech acts seems to be excluded in disjunctions and conditionals. Recent results regarding the embeddability of scalar implicatures are discussed in Sauerland (2014).
Semantics and Linguistic Theory, 2022
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Papers by Salvatore Pistoia-Reda