A recent influential experimental finding in pragmatics is that of : that different lexical items vary robustly in how likely they are to lead to scalar inference. For instance, hearers are much more likely to strengthen the meaning of to than to infer from . In this paper, we address the question of what underlies scalar diversity and identify two sources of uncertainty: uncertainty associated with the identity of relevant alternatives, and uncertainty associated with the step of excluding those alternatives. In our experiments, we make use of the Question Under Discussion to eliminate the former, and of the focus particle to eliminate the latter kind of uncertainty. Our findings show that both manipulations make inference calculation more likely, but only when they are combined is scalar diversity reduced to a minimum. In order to quantitatively characterize the observed (reduction in) variation, this paper adopts the information theoretic measure of relative entropy.

中文翻译：

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还能说什么？实用推论的替代方案和变异性

最近在语用学中一个有影响力的实验发现是：不同的词汇项在导致标量推理的可能性方面存在很大差异。例如，听众更有可能强化 to 的含义，而不是推断 from 的含义。在本文中，我们解决了标量多样性背后的问题，并确定了两个不确定性来源：与相关替代方案的身份相关的不确定性，以及与排除这些替代方案的步骤相关的不确定性。在我们的实验中，我们利用正在讨论的问题来消除前者，并利用焦点粒子来消除后一种不确定性。我们的研究结果表明，这两种操作都使推理计算更有可能，但只有将它们结合起来时，标量多样性才会降至最低。为了定量表征观察到的变化（减少），本文采用相对熵的信息论测度。