Leiden University Student Repository

Papanikolaou, Stefania (2020)

“Interpreting scalar implicatures and their sensitivity to face in Greek.”

Master thesis | Linguistics (MA)

In this thesis, we present an experiment designed to examine the interpretation of scalar implicatures in Greek. Scalar implicatures appear to examples like “I ate some of the pasta.” This sentence implies that the speaker uses the term “some” because s/he had reasons not to use the stronger word “all” in the sentence, e.g. “I didn’t eat all of the pasta.” Recent studies of experimental pragmatics suggest that the inference “I ate some (but not all) of the pasta” would not exist in face-saving acts (Bonnefon, J.-F., Feeney, A. & G. Villejoubert (2009). By contrast, Terkourafi and Weissman claim that face-boosting contexts favor lower-bound interpretations. We conducted an experiment addressing this issue, by testing a group of 40 adults (all native speakers of Greek) on four different scalar terms, , , , . Overall, our results indicate that Boost story Version favors lower bound interpretation and are...Show moreIn this thesis, we present an experiment designed to examine the interpretation of scalar implicatures in Greek. Scalar implicatures appear to examples like “I ate some of the pasta.” This sentence implies that the speaker uses the term “some” because s/he had reasons not to use the stronger word “all” in the sentence, e.g. “I didn’t eat all of the pasta.” Recent studies of experimental pragmatics suggest that the inference “I ate some (but not all) of the pasta” would not exist in face-saving acts (Bonnefon, J.-F., Feeney, A. & G. Villejoubert (2009). By contrast, Terkourafi and Weissman claim that face-boosting contexts favor lower-bound interpretations. We conducted an experiment addressing this issue, by testing a group of 40 adults (all native speakers of Greek) on four different scalar terms, , , , . Overall, our results indicate that Boost story Version favors lower bound interpretation and are consistent with Terkourafi and Weissman’s conclusions and opposite to Bonnefon’s and colleagues’ hypothesisShow less

Experimental pragmatics

scalar implicatures

politeness

Greek

Author

Papanikolaou, Stefania

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

Linguistics

Supervisors

Terkourafi, Marina

ECTS Credits

20

Language

en