Previous research on scalar implicature has primarily relied on meta-linguistic judgment tasks and found varying rates of such inferences depending on the nature of the task and contextual manipulations. This paper introduces a novel interactive paradigm involving both a production and a comprehension side and a precise conversational goal. The main research question is what is reliably communicated by some in this communicative setting, both when the quantifier occurs in unembedded and embedded positions. Our new paradigm involves an action-based task from which participants’ interpretation of utterances can be inferred. It incorporates a game-theoretic design, thereby including a precise model to predict participants’ behaviour in the experimental context. Our study shows that embedded and unembedded implicatures are reliably communicated by some. We propose two cognitive principles that describe what can be left unsaid. In our experimental context, a production strategy based on these principles is more efficient (with equal communicative success but shorter utterances) than a strategy based on literal descriptions.

中文翻译：

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内在含义：有什么可以不说的？

先前对标量含义的研究主要依赖于元语言判断任务，并发现此类推理的发生率取决于任务的性质和上下文操作。本文介绍了一种新颖的交互范式，涉及生产和理解方面以及精确的对话目标。主要的研究问题是，当量词出现在非嵌入和嵌入位置时，某些人在这种交流环境中可靠地交流了什么。我们的新范式涉及一项基于行动的任务，从中可以推断出参与者对话语的解释。它结合了博弈论设计，从而包括一个精确的模型来预测参与者在实验环境中的行为。我们的研究表明，某些人可以可靠地传达嵌入式和非嵌入式含义。我们提出了两个认知原则来描述可以不说的内容。在我们的实验环境中，基于这些原则的生产策略比基于字面描述的策略更有效（具有同等的交流成功但话语更短）。