title: Processing inferences at the semantics/pragmatics frontier: disjunctions and free choice.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: LSCP, EHESS, ENS, CNRS, France. Electronic address: chemla@ens.fr.
authors.forename: Emmanuel
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Chemla
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Tower Building, Park Place, Cardiff, CF10 3AT, UK.
authors.forename: Lewis
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Bott
mesh_terms: D002755:Choice Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D032882:Comprehension; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012660:Semantics; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Free choice; Inferences; Pragmatics; Processing; Scalar implicatures