Ramotowska, S; Marty, P; Romoli, J; Sudo, Y; Breheny, R; (2022) Diversity with Universality. In: Proceedings of the 23rd Amsterdam Colloquium 2022. (pp. pp. 251-257). The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) of the University of Amsterdam

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Abstract

This paper investigates the ‘Diversity’ inferences (D-inferences) arising from disjunction embedded in the scope of a universal quantifier, e.g., Every X is A or B suggests Some Xs are A and Some Xs are B. It has previously been claimed (i) that D-inferences are independent from ‘Negative Universal’ inferences (NU-inferences), which are the negations of Every X is A and Every X is B, but (ii) that for disjunction in the scope of a universal modal the D-inferences cannot be observed independently of the NU-inferences ([3, 7, 9, 13]). Experiment 1 tested the availability of D-inferences in the absence of NU-inferences for the determiner every and the epistemic modal must. Experiment 2 followed up on Experiment 1 by testing the same two quantifiers, only this time the modal must expressed deontic necessity. The results show that, for both types of quantifiers, D-inferences could be derived independently of NU-inferences. While the results for every essentially replicate those reported in [7], the results for must are new and go against the aforementioned claim (ii). In addition, the response time results from both experiments show that D-inferences are associated with response delay effects in the opposite direction to those observed for regular scalar implicatures in similar tasks ([4, 5]). We argue that these findings about the time course of D-inferences raise a new challenge for an implicature-based approach to these inferences.

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