Scalar Implication as a linguistic universal: experimental data from Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

In this work we investigate the acquisition of scalar implicature in Brazilian Portuguese searching for the components that underlie mastery of such kind of inference. The subjects of our experiment were 5 and 7 year olds acquiring Brazilian Portuguese. Analogue sentences containing weak scalar terms were uttered in lower-bound and upper-bound contexts, allowing us to test children's capacity of giving literal or scalar implicature interpretation to scalar terms depending on the contextual influence. The tested children showed contextual sensitivity by giving the expected interpretations. Our results reinforce the ones obtained in studies on other languages.

Keywords

• Aquisição de linguagem. Português brasileiro. Pragmática. Implicatura escalar.