School of Chinese as a Second Language, Peking University.
Wluper Ltd.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2024 May;50(5):808-818. doi: 10.1037/xlm0001278. Epub 2023 Aug 10.
The phenomenon of scalar diversity refers to the well-replicated finding that different scalar expressions give rise to scalar implicatures (SIs) at different rates. Previous work has shown that part of the scalar diversity effect can be explained by theoretically motivated factors. Although the effect has been established only in controlled experiments using manually constructed stimuli, there has been a tendency to assume that the marked differences in inference rates that have been observed reflect differences to be found in naturally occurring discourse. We explore whether this is the case by sampling actual language usage involving a wide range of scalar expressions. Adopting the approach in Degen (2015), we investigated the scalar diversity effect in a corpus of Twitter data we constructed. We find that the phenomenon of scalar diversity attenuates significantly when measured in a corpus-based paraphrase task. Although the degree of "scalar diversity" varies, we find that factors derived from theories of SI can explain nearly two-thirds of the variation. This remains the case whether the variation is observed in controlled experiments or in the context of natural language use. As for the remaining variation, we hypothesize that it may be due to a high level of uncertainty about whether adjectival scalar expressions should undergo scalar enrichment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
标量多样性现象是指一个得到充分证实的发现，即不同的标量表达式以不同的速率产生标量蕴含 (SI)。先前的研究表明，部分标量多样性效应可以用理论驱动的因素来解释。尽管该效应仅在使用手动构建刺激的受控实验中得到证实，但人们倾向于假设观察到的推理率的显著差异反映了在自然话语中会发现的差异。我们通过采样涉及广泛标量表达式的实际语言用法来探讨这种情况是否属实。我们采用 Degen（2015）的方法，在我们构建的 Twitter 数据语料库中研究了标量多样性效应。我们发现，在基于语料库的释义任务中，标量多样性现象显著减弱。尽管“标量多样性”的程度有所不同，但我们发现 SI 理论衍生的因素可以解释近三分之二的变化。无论是在受控实验中还是在自然语言使用的背景下观察到这种变化，都是如此。至于剩余的变化，我们假设它可能是由于对形容词标量表达式是否应该进行标量丰富存在高度不确定性所致。
