Lauren: The thing that all of the examples in this episode have in common is that the implicature comes up because we can put these things on a scale, but that’s not the only way that implicature works.

Gretchen: You can also imply things that don’t really seem to be scalar. There was an example of a tweet that went up a little while ago where somebody posted a photo of a house that was for sale. There was a big sign on top of the “For Sale” sign that said, “Not Haunted.”

Lauren: Okay, so, I have a lot of questions that I possibly wouldn’t have had if there was just a normal “For Sale” sign.

Gretchen: Right, exactly. The “Not Haunted” sign is doing this implicature of “Wait, but I am supposed to expect this house might be haunted?” But it’s not doing so on a particular scale. Like, it’s haunted or not haunted, which is not really a scale. It’s just a “Wait. Suddenly this information is relevant?”

Lauren: This feels like an example of that meme of “My ‘House Not Haunted’ sign has people asking a lot of questions that are already answered by my ‘House Not Haunted’ sign.”

Excerpt from Lingthusiasm episode ‘Cool things about scales and implicature’

Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about semantics and pragmatics

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 62: Cool things about scales and implicature. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 62 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about scales and implicature. But first, it’s our 5th anniversary! I can’t believe we’ve been making this show for five years.

Gretchen: As ever, we do a new listener drive for our anniversary. If you know someone who’d be keen on a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, and you wanna send them a personal recommendation, if there’s another podcast you love which you wanna suggest does a crossover episode with us, or if you just wanna share the show on your general social media, we appreciate all forms of recommendations. They really do work each year to bring new listeners into the show.

Lauren: Also, feel free to tag us @Lingthusiasm in your recommendations on social media, or you can just feel the warm glow of satisfaction in your heart.

Gretchen: You can also share the lingthusiasm by getting Lingthusiasm merch or an annual Patreon membership for a fellow lingthusiast, which will give them access to bonus episodes for the whole year plus the library of existing bonus content – now over 50 bonus episodes. This makes a great gift for you or someone else.

Lauren: Whether you’re new or old to the show, thank you so much for being here.

Gretchen: Speaking of bonus episodes, our most recent bonus was on linguistic illusions – all of the things where you think you hear or understand and then actually there’s something else going on.

Lauren: This and 56 other bonus episodes are at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Lauren: I have a quiz for you, Gretchen.

Gretchen: Okay.

Lauren: Which is warmer – “tepid” or “lukewarm”?

Gretchen: I think of both of these as characteristics that apply to water. I think lukewarm water feels a little bit warmer to me. But they’re both that kind of, you know, room-temperature-a-little-bit-warmer, you know, the temperature of water they use to make yeast go with bread. Yeah, do you have a strong opinion about these?

Lauren: I thought that I would, and I just cannot fix in my mind which one should be warmer. Maybe “lukewarm,” but I think it’s possibly because I don’t know what “leuk” means. It is a lost Old English word that means “tepid.” So, even etymologically, we’re going in circles here. I don’t have a sense of how they compare to each other.

Gretchen: When I was a kid, I definitely knew a kid called “Luke,” and I was like, “Oh, it’s the type of water that Luke likes,” like for his bath or something.

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 62: Cool things about scales and implicature

We can plot the words we use to describe temperature on a scale: cold, cool, warm, hot. It’s not as precise as a temperature scale like Celsius or Fahrenheit, but we all generally agree on where these words sit in relation to each other. We can also do the same with other sets of words that don’t necessarily have an equivalent scientific scale, such as the relationship between “some", “a few” and “many“ or even words like “suppose”, “believe” and “know”.  

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about the things that get implied when we use words that involve scales, aka scalar implicature. Why can we revise our description of a warm coffee by saying “actually, it’s hot” but not “actually, it’s cold”? What happens when your language breaks up the scale differently to another language (spoiler: everyone can still agree that a warm spring day is different to a scorching hot one in the height of summer). And how can implied scales be used for humorous purposes, as in the Whale Fact™ that many whales were never taught how to drive manual stick shift?

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here

Announcements:

It’s our 5 year anniversary! We’ve loved sharing the Lingthusiasm with you all these year, and as we do every year for our anniversary celebrations, we’re asking you to share it too! Share your favourite episode or moment on social media (and don’t forget to tag us!), or just tell a friend who you think could use a little more linguistics in their life. Then go forth and enjoy the warm fuzzies of having spread the linguistic joy!

In this month’s bonus episode we’re getting enthusiastic about linguistic illusions! We talk about the where the Yanny/Laurel illusion that became popular on social media a while back came from, the McGurk Effect, using the Stroop Test to find spies, hallucinating words from musical instruments, the Comparative Illusion (aka "More people have been to Russia than I have”), and making our own speech to song illusion to infect you with (sorry) (no but seriously).

Join us on Patreon to listen to this and 56 other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can discuss your favourite linguistically interesting fiction with other language nerds!

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Wikipedia entry for Scalar Implicature
• Lingthusiasm Episode 11: Layers of meaning - Cooperation, humour, and Gricean Maxims
• Lingthusiasm Episode 19: Sentences with baggage - Presuppositions
• Etymology of ‘lukewarm’
• Elizabeth Pankratz’s Twitter thread on scalar inference of emojis
• Intentionally Confusing’s Tumblr post on scale and implied information
• Slate article on why ‘at least 10 ducks’ is funny
• All Things Linguistic post on Cabin Pressure
• Balancing the (Horn) Scale: Explaining the Production-Comprehension Asymmetry for Scalar Implicatures
  
• The trouble with quantifiers: Exploring children’s deficits in scalar implicature
  
• Wikipedia entry for Implicature
• House for Sale - Not Haunted
• Know Your Meme - a lot of questions already answered by the shirt
• At Least 5 Squids
• Many whales were never taught how to drive stick shift

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

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Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production manager is Liz McCullough, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).