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8/ If Turkey defeats Paraguay (and whatever else needs to happen), good luck to them!

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7/ This is broadly analogous to scalar implicatures (e.g. "some" implying "not all"), but unlike them, CP doesn't require negating lexically-encoded alternatives.

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6/ Our results support an account where Conditional Perfection (CP) arises as a quantity-implicature, via a process of exhaustification over contextually available, QUD-constrained alternatives whose status is known to the speaker.

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5/ Perfection also depends on speaker knowledge: listeners infer an alternative is false only if they assume the speaker knows its status. A speaker who seems uninformed about, say, what a draw would do won't trigger that inference. (Exp 3)

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4/ If the conversation is about what happens if Turkey defeats Paraguay, a consequent-focused QUD, alternatives vary over the consequent (advance, go to tiebreakers, still get eliminated), not other antecedents. Perfection doesn't arise. (Exp 1)

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3/ If the conversation is about what Turkey needs to do to advance, an antecedent-focused QUD, alternative antecedents become relevant: drawing with Paraguay, defeating the US, or Australia defeating the US. The conditional implies these are false, since otherwise they'd have been mentioned. (Exp 1)

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2/ Which alternatives matter depends on the Question Under Discussion, the conversation that's happening when the conditional gets uttered. Take the hypothetical possibilities football fans run through this World Cup, like my group chat: "If Turkey defeats Paraguay, they advance to the next stage"

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Conditional inference and access to alternatives: the role of QUD and speaker knowledge in conditional perfection

New paper w/Alan Bale & @drbarner.bsky.social in Journal of Semantics!🎉 We show in 3 studies that conditionals get strengthened to "only if" depending on listeners' access to alternatives, constrained by QUD & speaker knowledge, paralleling other forms of pragmatic inference. doi.org/10.1093/jos/...

doi.org

Abstract. Conditional statements often imply meanings that extend beyond their literal content, influenced by contextual factors such as the Question Under

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Reposted by Ebru Evcen

David Barner @drbarner.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Children actually CAN compute scalar implicatures & only fail when we proffer "worlds" that invite unintended inferences. Check out new work by @ebruevcen.bsky.social showing early success in a standard TVJ task for both disjunction & some/all & how this totally changes our lab's account of failire.

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7/ If you work on implicature, pragmatic development, or just think kids are more interesting than we give them credit for, give it a read!

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6/ Our take: kids spontaneously access relevant alternative utterances and compute scalar implicatures when allowed to generate their own interpretations before evaluating experimenter-provided worlds, and that previous studies underestimate this ability by artificially proffering irrelevant worlds.

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5/ Same pattern in Exp. 2 with "some" ("Lucy colored some of the cows"). Act-Out phase: kids colored 1, 2, or 3 cows, almost never all four. TVJ phase: 82% rejected the puppet coloring "all four"

4/ In Exp. 1, kids first colored to show what "Lucy colored the cow or the horse" meant to THEM, then judged a puppet's response. Act-Out phase: 94.6% of trials, kids colored just one TVJ phase: They rejected when the puppet colored "both", but not when tested in TVJ-only, without acting out first.

3/ But here's what act-out studies show: kids almost never act on all objects when they hear "some," or both when they hear "or." But that doesn't mean they computed the implicature. Acting on one object doesn't tell us whether they'd reject "both" So we designed a novel two-phase task: Act-Out+TVJ

2/ The standard story: kids hear "Some of the horses jumped" when ALL did, and accept it as a perfectly good description. But WHY? One answer: kids can't access stronger relevant alternatives (like "all") to compute the implicature.