Article summary: Bonnefon, Feeney & Villejoubert (2009)

…let the blogging begin!

Here’s a summary of the article “When some is actually all: Scalar inferences in face-threatening contexts” about… scalar implicatures in face-threatening contexts, published 2009 in Cognition.

Instead of following up on the debate over the default character/local computation of scalar implicatures, this paper addresses the question of which kinds of contexts lead to strengthening or weakening of “some but not all” implicatures. Specifically, the authors conduct three sentence rating studies to investigate whether face-threatening contexts (for the listener) lead to a reduction in implicature endorsements. -…they do.