1. The role of partitive construction
in generating scalar implicatures
Mirjana Mandić, Boban Arsenijević
Department of Serbian Language
Faculty of Philosophy
University of Niš, Serbia
Olinco 2013

2. Scalar implicatures (SIs)
• Scalar terms (Horn 2006)
– sets of alternative meanings, ordered according to their
informativness
• (1a) <a, some, many, most, all>
• (1b) <or, and>
• (1c) <one, two, three>
• <weak, strong> <some, all>
• S (x) → W (x) all (x) → some (x)
• W (x) +> ¬ S (x) some (x) +> ¬ all (x)
2

3. Scalar implicatures
Some elephants have trunks. (Noveck 2001)
→ Not all elephants have trunks.
(We bought 5 apples. )
Some (of the) apples are on the table.
→ Not all (the) apples are on the table.
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4. Theoretical background
• two different words or one word with two
readings?
• which one is the default one:
– a lower-bounding truth-conditional
component (“at least some”)
– an upper-bounding non-truth-conditional
component (“not all”)
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5. Theoretical background
• defaultism
– strong: a scalar inference is triggered by a word
and the triggering process is fast
– weak: “By default interpretation, I simply mean
the one that most people would give in
circumstances in which the context is unbiased
one way or the other.” (Chierchia 2004: 51)
• contextualism
– scalar term meaning must be strengthened in
the context (Geurts 2011)
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6. Previous research
• developmental perspective
• Noveck 2001, Papafragou & Musolino 2003, Barner,
Brooks i Bale 2010
• COST Action project
• Katsos et al. 2009, Katsos et al. 2011
– Serbian neki 54% vs. English some 99%
• Methodological problem: partitive vs. non-
partitive some.
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7. Serbian quantifier neki ‘some’
• Neke jabuke / neke od jabuka su na stolu.
‘Some /some of the apples are on the table.’
– cardinal, i.e. weak reading
– proportional, i.e. strong reading
• [some]weak = A∩B ≠ Ø
[some]strong = A∩B ≠ Ø. [¬(A ⊂ B)]
• the ambiguity of Serbian bare nouns (due to the
lack of articles): definite, indefinite, non-
referential and generic interpretation
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8. Hypothesis
• the scalar implicature of the quantifier neki ‘some’
in adults fails due to a failure in the establishment
of the right reference domain restriction
• SIs should be facilitated if the proper reference
domain is provided by linguistic means:
– the use of contexts facilitating the definite
interpretation of the noun
– the use of partitive construction in which the
noun receives a definite interpretation
(neki od + noun.gen ‘some of the NOUN’)
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9. Partitivity and scalar implicatures
• Pouscoulous et al. 2007
– certains vs. quelques in French
• Banga et al. 2009
– sommige (van de) vs. enkele (van de) in
Dutch
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10. Experiments
• Conditions:
– partitivity: non-partitive (some apples) vs.
partitive (some of the apples)
– contrastive focus: quantifier, predicate, neutral
1. SOME (of the) apples are on the table.
2. Some (of the) apples are ON THE TABLE.
3. Some (of the) apples are on the table.
– word order: initial vs. final QNP
1. Some (of the) apples are on the table.
2. On the table are some (of the) apples.
• Dependent measure: percentage of rejected
statements (SI)
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11. Truth-Value Judgment Task
Participants: 56 adult native speakers of Serbian
We picked 5 apples from the tree.
Neke jabuke su na stolu.
some apples are on table.
Did Pera see it well?
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12. Truth-Valued Judgment Task
We picked 5 apples from the tree. 5 birds live in the park.
Target (5/5): Filler:
Some apples are on the table. (The) red birds are in the tree.
We brought 5 bananas from the market. We got 5 balls for the birthday.
Control (3/5): true Control (0/5): false
Some bananas are on the table. Some balls are on the table. 12

13. Results
• General Linear Model Repeated Measures
ANOVA
partitivity x focus x word order
– main effect of partitivity (F=33.921, df=1,
p<0.0001)
– main effect of word order (F=4.061, df=1,
p<0.05)
– reliable interaction between partitivity and
focus (F=4.116, df=2, p<0.05)
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14. Results: overall SIs derived:
59% in part, 27% in non-part constr.
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
1
part non-part part non-part part non-part
quantifier predicative neutral
-SI
+SI
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
1
part non-part part non-part part non-part
quantifier predicative neutral
-SI
+SI
14
Initial QNP:
49% part, 16.6.%
non-part
Some apples are
on (the) table.
Final QNP:
68% part,
37% non-part
On (the) table are
some apples.

15. The role of partitivity
• partitivity affects the availability of SIs
• two loci of scalarity:
1. the scalarity between the weaker, ambiguous
neki+noun ‘some+noun’ construction and the
stronger, only scalar partitive construction
2. the scalarity of the term neki ‘some’ with
respect to other terms such as svi ‘all’ or
nijedan ‘none’
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16. Concluding remarks
• cross-linguistic variation
• the role of linguistic factors in generating SIs
• implications for the developmental perspective
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17. References
• Banga, A. et al. 2009. Some implicature reveal semantic differences. Available at:
http://www.let.rug.nl/hendriks/papers/bangaetal09.pdf
• Barner, D. et al. 2010. Quantity implicatures and access to scalar alternatives in language acquisition. In
Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 20, 525–543.
• Breheny, R. et al. 2006. Are scalar implicatures generated on-line by default? Cognition 100: 434–463.
• Geurts, B. 2011. Quantity implicatures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Chierchia, G. 2004. Scalar implicatures, polarity phenomena and the syn-tax/pragmatics interface. In A.
Belletti (Ed.),Structures and beyond, 39–103.
• Oxford University Press.
• Horn, L. 2006. Implicatures. In The Handbook of Pragmatics, eds. L. Horn i G. Ward, 3–28. Blackwell
Publishing Ltd.
• Herburger, E. 1997. Focus and weak noun phrases. Natural Language Semantics 5: 53–78.
• Katsos, N. et al. 2009. Semantika kvantifikatora u srpskom. Implikature i domet kod odraslih i dece. Rad
predstavljen na Petnaestoj godišnjoj konferenciji Empirijska istraživanja u psihologiji, 6–7. Februar
2009, Beograd, Srbija.
• Katsos, N. et al. 2012. The acquisition of quantification across languages. In Proceedings of the 36th
annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, eds. A. Biller, E. Chung &A. Kimball,
258–268. Cascadilla Press.
• Noveck, I. 2001.When children are more logical than adults: experimental investigations of scalar
implicature. Cognition 78: 165–188.
• Papafragou, A. ,Musolino, J. 2003. Scalar implicatures: experiments at the semantic/pragmatic interface.
Cognition 86: 253–282.
• Pouscoulous, N. et al. 2007. A developmental investigation of processing costs in implicature production.
Language Acquisition14 (4): 347–375. 17

18. THANK YOU!
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19. Acknowledgments
• We are grateful to Darinka Anñelković, Maja
Savić and Oliver Tošković (Laboratory for
Experimental Psychology, Belgrade) for their
help in designing the experiments, as well as
Tihana Smiljanić, Lazar Bojičić and Snežana
Todorović (Petnica Science Center, Serbia) for
their help in pursuing the experiments.
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