No Delay for Some Inferences

We present an eye-tracking study on the incremental derivation of the some-but-not-all scalar implicature (SI) associated to the scalar quantifier some. This question has been the matter of a vivid debate, both in linguistics and in psycholinguistics (Chemla & Singh 2014a,b). Experimentally, it was addressed by means of eye-tracking and different results were obtained: while Huang & Snedeker (2009) found evidence for a delay of some with respect to all, Grodner et al. (2010) argued for a rapid integration of pragmatic some. More recently, Breheny et al. (2013a,b) raised some criticism on the paradigm employed in those studies and contributed with a looking-while-listening task showing incremental derivation of the scalar inference. We first raise some methodological questions, arguing that the paradigm used in previous studies was not apt to distinguish whether a scalar inference was derived or not, for different reasons. By means of a novel visual-world eye-tracking experiment in which we exploit the notion of focus in the activation of scalar alternatives, we show new evidence for the incremental derivation of the pragmatic some-but-not-all interpretation of some. We interpret these results within a grammatical approach to SIs (Chierchia et al. 2012; Chierchia 2013), according to which, when scalar alternatives are active, the SI is factored in locally and incrementally during the on-line processing of the scalar quantifier.