Shared mechanisms in pragmatic enrichment with contextual and lexical alternatives

Abstract

We explore the role of contextual versus lexical alternatives in pragmatic strengthening using a novel training-with-feedback paradigm. In two experiments, we investigate whether training with inferences over contextual alternatives affects pragmatic strengthening with lexical alternatives, and the other way around. In both Experiments, we find that training that encouraged (or discouraged) pragmatic strengthening of simple disjunctions carried over to complex disjunctions of an unfamiliar kind to our experimental participants. This shows that our novel methodology is effective in training general mechanisms for activating alternatives. In Experiment 2, we showed that this methodology can be made to work across different kinds of alternatives, if certain salience conditions are met.