A speaker says 'Some students passed the exam.' A listener infers 'Not all students passed.' Which of the following best describes the current status of this inference in linguistics?
AIt is clearly a pragmatic inference derived by the Gricean maxim of quantity, not part of the sentence's semantic content
BIt is clearly a semantic entailment encoded by the word 'some'
CIt is a contested case: some theorists treat it as pragmatic implicature, others argue it is semantically encoded
DIt is neither semantic nor pragmatic — it is a logical deduction from the quantifier
Scalar implicatures sit precisely at the contested boundary between semantics and pragmatics. The Gricean view treats 'not all' as a pragmatic inference triggered by the maxim of quantity — if the speaker knew all students passed, they would have said so. But some theorists argue the inference is so systematic and automatic that it is part of the semantic content of 'some' itself. This dispute is not merely terminological; it has empirical consequences and remains actively contested with cross-linguistic evidence on both sides.
Question 2 Multiple Choice
The sentence 'I am hungry' is true when a hungry person says it and false when they do not. This shows that:
AThe sentence's meaning is entirely determined by pragmatic inference from context
BContext does semantic work — it is embedded in the truth conditions of the sentence itself, not merely added as implicature
CThe sentence has no stable semantic content and must be interpreted entirely afresh each time
DThis is a case of implicature, since the sentence's literal meaning does not include information about the speaker
Indexicals like 'I,' 'here,' and 'now' show that context can determine truth conditions — the very content of what is literally said — not merely what is implied beyond what is said. This is semantic context-dependence, not pragmatic implicature. The minimalist view that semantics provides a context-independent core is challenged precisely by indexicals, which require context as an input to produce any truth-evaluable semantic content at all.
Question 3 True / False
The boundary between semantics and pragmatics is a pre-theoretical, natural distinction that most major theories of language agree upon in its basic outline.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
The boundary is a theoretical construct, and different theories draw it in different places. Minimalists like Cappelen and Lepore draw a sharp line: semantics handles grammatically encoded content and explicit indexicals; everything else is pragmatics. Contextualists argue that pragmatic processes routinely enter truth conditions, blurring the boundary. The disagreement is not about minor details but about the fundamental nature of meaning and what linguistic forms encode. The boundary's location is one of the central empirical disputes in philosophy of language.
Question 4 True / False
Context can affect what a sentence literally says (its truth conditions), not only what it implies beyond what is said.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: True
This is the contextualist position, supported by cases like 'It's raining' (true only relative to a contextually determined location) and 'John is ready' (requires a contextually supplied complement). These are not cases of implicature added on top of a context-independent semantic content; the contextual contribution is needed to generate any truth-evaluable content at all. Whether this means pragmatics intrudes into semantics or that semantics is richer than minimalists allow is the contested question.
Question 5 Short Answer
Explain why indexicals like 'I,' 'here,' and 'now' complicate the idea that semantics provides a context-independent core of meaning.
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: Indexicals are expressions whose semantic value shifts with the context of utterance — 'I' refers to whoever is speaking, 'here' to the location of utterance, 'now' to the time. This means context must be consulted to determine the truth conditions of sentences containing these terms, not merely to add implicature on top of a fixed semantic core. Context is doing semantic work, not just pragmatic work.
The significance is that it defeats the clean picture where semantics is context-free and pragmatics adds context. If context must enter to produce any truth-evaluable semantic content, then the separation between 'what is said' (context-free semantics) and 'what is implied' (context-sensitive pragmatics) collapses for indexical sentences. Contextualists generalize from this to argue that contextual intrusion is widespread; minimalists try to contain it to a small class of grammatically marked cases.