Early interpretation of scalar quantifiers in context: Mousetracking evidence for the role of social reasoning

The scalar quantifier some is ambiguous between a literal meaning (“some and possibly all”) and a pragmatically strengthened meaning (“some but not all”, known as scalar implicature). Listener’s interpretations of some have been shown to be influenced by context (Breheny, Ferguson,& Katsos, 2013; Breheny, Katsos, & Williams, 2006; Panizza, Chierchia, & Clifton, 2009; Politzer-Ahles and Husband, 2018). For example, Loy et al. (2019) investigated how the interpretation of some depends on rapid reasoning about the speaker’s manner ofspeech. Loy et al. used a context in which interpreting some literally (larger some-and-possibly-all value) is likely to be socially undesirable (“I ate some oreos”) and showed that where speakers were disfluent (“I ate, uh, some oreos”), listeners were more likely to make an early commitment to a literal interpretation than when the speakers were fluent.