Probabilities and logic in implicature computation Two puzzles with embedded disjunction
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Abstract
Sentences are standardly assumed to trigger scalar and ignorance implicatures because there are alternative utterances the speaker could have said. The central question in modeling these inferences is thus: what counts as an alternative utterance for a given sentence in a given context? In this paper, I will present two families of novel empirical observations related to inference and deviance patterns of embedded disjunction, based on which I will argue that (i) probabilistic informativeness plays a role in selecting the set of alternatives; and (ii) the role of prior world knowledge in evaluating probabilistic informativeness of alternatives is limited.
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