Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Work in pragmatics shows that speakers typically avoid stating
information already given in the discourse (Horn, 1984). However, it’s
unclear how listeners interpret utterances which assert material that
can be inferred using prior knowledge. We argue that informationally
redundant utterances can trigger context-dependent implicatures, which
increase utterance utility in line with listener expectations (Atlas &
Levinson, 1981; Horn, 1984). We focus on utterances which refer to event
sequences describing common activities (scripts, such as 'going to a
grocery store').
Our first experiment shows that listeners may assign informationally
redundant event mentions (such as 'John went to the store. He paid the
cashier!') an 'informative' pragmatic interpretation, by reinterpreting
the activity in question as relatively atypical in context (i.e. 'John
does not typically pay the cashier'). Such a (re-)interpretation does
not arise for event mentions that are informative either a priori, or in
context. Two follow-up experiments show that the strength of such
atypicality inferences depends on the perceived speaker intentionality.