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.

Lauren: Completely different history of those two words but understandable that you would come to that very specific folk history.

Gretchen: I mean, kids, right? This is the place that spurious etymologies are made of. Whereas I don’t think I encountered “tepid” until I was a bit older.

Lauren: We have a clear sense of how “hot” and “cold” relate to each other and that “tepid” and “lukewarm” are somewhere in the middle, but things get a little bit fuzzy in that middle space.

Gretchen: They totally do. There’re actually also cross-linguistic differences in terms of how we carve up the temperature space. I spent a long time when I was learning French trying to figure out what their word for “warm” was.

Lauren: Is there one?

Gretchen: The answer is there isn’t really one. You can say for warm water, if you’re directly contrasting it with hot water, “de l'eau tiède,” which is really more like “lukewarm” or “tepid” water. You can’t say that of the weather. You can’t say that of other types of things. You just talk about the weather being “chaud,” being “hot.” The first day of spring, you’re like, “Oh, it’s finally above 0. Oh, it’s so hot out,” which you can say in English, right. Like, “Oh, it’s the first day of warm weather after a long period of time,” you can be like, “Oh, it’s so hot.”

Lauren: I think it’s just worth saying that your idea of what counts as hot weather coming out of a Canadian winter and my idea of hot weather in the middle of an Australian summer is relevant and contextual.

Gretchen: To be fair, my idea of what counts as hot in my April versus in my July is also extremely different.

Lauren: These things are relative. I assume this means that because of context French people can actually perceive the difference between a pleasantly warm day and an unpleasantly over-hot day.

Gretchen: Yeah. I mean, it’s not like they’re confused about whether you need to wear a sweater when it’s 10 degrees versus 30 degrees. Obviously, they know. But the same word that’s used for the whole span of warmer-than-I-would’ve-expected or hot-in-some-way-that’s-significant-to-me. French does have a word – in fact, several words – for “cool” in the temperature sense. “Frais” is “cool.” Also, “frette” is “cool,” which is a Quebec word. Then “froid” is properly “cold.” It was weird to me that in English you have this symmetrical scale where it has one mid-point term on each side of perceptual zero, which isn’t actually zero degrees, but it’s unremarkable temperature. Then you have slightly more and less than remarkable, and then a lot more or less than remarkable. The weirdest thing for me was having this lack of symmetry on the scale. But as it happens, this is a language family thing. Having words for “warm” and “hot” is common in Balto-Slavic languages and Germanic languages – of course, English is a Germanic language. But in Romance languages – French “chaude,” Spanish “caliente,” and Latin “calidus,” and then also in Greek “thermos,” which you may recognise as the origin of “thermometer” and other words – one word covers both.

Lauren: I didn’t realise it had such a time depth to it. Interesting. English has more points on the scale for warmth than French does, but it’s not necessarily a single scale. We treat warm water and hot water the same way we treat warm weather and hot weather, but when I was learning Nepali, I had to learn the difference when you use the word for “hot” that refers to weather and the word for “hot” that refers to water and beverages. There’s “gharmi,” which is warm weather, and then “tato,” which is warm or hot for if you want your water to be hot.

Gretchen: Is this for food as well? Does that go with the beverages?

Lauren: Food goes with beverages. I remember it very clearly in the context of beverages because the non-weather word for “cold” is “chiso.” You can actually ask for a “chiso,” and you’ll get a canned beverage.

Gretchen: So, like a cold drink versus a hot drink like tea or something?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: I guess, like, English has, “I wanna a cold one,” which is used for beer.

Lauren: Similar vibes but completely different words used for these two different heat scales.

Gretchen: That’s interesting. When I was looking up the etymology for “cold,” which is very old, goes back to Proto-Indo European, Etymonline, interestingly – because it doesn’t normally have entries about Japanese – but it points out that Japanese has two words for “cold” as well. “Samui” for coldness in the atmosphere or environment, and “tsumetai” for things which are cold to touch, which is also used in the figurative sense for personalities and behaviours.

Lauren: Cool. It’s more cool than “cool.” It’s “cold” as a fact. That does not work. “Cool” has elevated itself out of the scale of temperatures.

Gretchen: That’s something else that I had to get used to as a teenager learning French that I couldn’t use the word for “cool,” “frais,” to mean “That’s neat. That’s nifty. That’s popular.” There are words for these things in French, but they aren’t weather words. That actually reminds me of another very obscure English word that’s used specifically to differentiate between different types of heat scales. This is the word “apricity.”

Lauren: I do not know this word. I don’t even have a sense of it. Can I make one up and see how close I get?

Gretchen: Go ahead.

Lauren: Is it a temperature word that means one of those perfectly middle-of-the-transition-of-seasons that captures the sense of a still April morning?

Gretchen: It is a word that’s found in April, but it specifically refers to the warmth of sunlight on the skin or on a surface as distinct from the warmth of the air. You can see that April is the kind of month that has some apricity. Whether you’re in the Northern or Southern hemisphere, April and October are those transitional temperature months where it’s kind of chilly, but you can stand at the window and feel the warmth, and then if you open the window, you’re like, “Oh, actually it’s cold.” Or you can be going for a walk and be like, “Oh, the sun feels so warm on my skin, but I’m still wearing a coat.”

Lauren: I’m absolutely going to take that into my active vocabulary. That’s a dimension of warmth I had never even had a specific word for before.

Gretchen: Isn’t it a charming word? I mean, to be fair, I think it is one of those philosopher words that was coined as a wouldn’t-it-be-great-if-there-was-a-distinction-for-this. I like it, and I’ve adopted it, too.

Lauren: Excellent. That’s how we make these distinctions happen.

Gretchen: Absolutely. Join the new apricity club.

Lauren: We can plot out “warm,” “hot,” “cold,” “very cold,” “chilly,” “mild” along a line. We have temperatures we associate with them. Although, as we’ve already said, those temperatures can be context and weather system dependent.

Gretchen: I think it’s worth pointing out that we can plot “warm” and “cold” and “hot” on a line not just because we have thermometers. People were doing this before thermometers. These words are all older than the scientific measurement of temperature, which is around 500 years old. One of the first thermoscopes, which was a precursor to the thermometer, was developed by the Italian inventor Galileo Galilei in the 1500s. Words for “hot” and “cold” are much older than that.

Lauren: We didn’t start really feeling weather just because we could assign absolute value numbers to the amount of weather or warmth that we felt.

Gretchen: We have this intuitive sense. Even a kid who hasn’t learned numbers or hasn’t learned how to read a thermometer yet can still feel a difference between cold and warm or hot.

Lauren: So far, we’ve been talking about temperature for which we have this fixed, absolute numerical scale, but we also have these words that we can affix to parts of that scale. There are also some things that sit on a scale even if we don’t have absolute, fixed quantities that we can attach to them, which means that I get to talk about one of my favourite experiments that I run in my semantics tutorials. Unfortunately, we don’t have 30 of us here and, unfortunately, I don’t have a big bag of lollies or confectionary, which is what I normally start this class with.

Gretchen: Where’s my candy?

Lauren: Gretchen, I’m very sorry.

Gretchen: You need to send me my candy over the internet.

Lauren: I come in with a bag of confectionary, and I put people into groups and ask one group of people to all take “a couple” of lollies. I ask the next group to take “a few” lollies. And I ask the next group to take “some” lollies. Then we count how many of the individual items people felt comfortable taking from the bag. Even though these are all kind of vague words – we might have a sense of them in some contexts – there’s variation in how many people take depending on the instructions they’ve been given. Some people will have a very literal interpretation of “a couple” and just take two. Others will be like, well, it’s a giant bag of small M&Ms, so they might take three or four. People who take a few – some will take three, some will take four or five. Then when people are given the instruction to take “some,” they might take six or seven – depending, of course, on monitoring other people because it’s not actually an experiment. It’s a social experiment in a tutorial.

Gretchen: It’s not a randomised, controlled trial.

Lauren: We talk about the fact that this bag of candy has a very specific volume, and they have a specific size. If I came in with boxes of cupcakes, that might radically alter how many they take. If we were talking about stars in the sky, when there’s so many teeny tiny stars, “a few stars” might be a section of the galaxy with hundreds of stars in it, which is more than you would feel comfortable taking candy from a bag.

Gretchen: Yeah. Because some people will get very dogmatic about, like, “a few” always means three or four. It does in many physical contexts. If I say, “I want a few eggs,” that probably does mean three or four eggs. But if you have a stadium that seats 10,000 people or 100,000 people, and only 1,000 people show up, you could look out at that stadium and say, “Only a few people are here.”

Lauren: That is a lot of eggs.

Gretchen: It’s just a lot of eggs. Maybe if you have a massive egg factory, and you normally process thousands and thousands of eggs a day, then, you know, “Oh, there’s only 100 today. What happened to all the eggs? There’s only a few here.” It really depends on what your baseline level expectation is for the exact numerical value. But “a few” means “not very many” in the context of the whole potential amount.

Lauren: We can still plot it on a scale with “a couple” where “a few” tends to be more than “a couple.” Thinking about the relationship between these terms in a scale even though the actual numbers aren’t always fixed is more useful for understanding the semantic difference between them than necessarily fixating on that very dogmatic, it-always-means-two kind of approach. Not everything that we conceptualise as sitting on a scale has to have some absolute, scientific unit type numerical value associated with it.

Gretchen: Numbers are, again, a relative newcomer to the group and expectation level ways that humans have been conceiving of quantities for a much longer period of time. It’s neat that words like “a couple” and “a few” and “some” pay attention to a logarithmic scale rather than to a strict numerical scale because it’s based on your expectations.

Lauren: In some ways, that brings us to another dimension of the scale which is how specific you’re being. A word like “a few” or “a couple” is less specific than saying “10 eggs” or “10 lollies” or “10 stars.” Talking in those less specific, less numerical terms implies in a way that you don’t know or you don’t have any reason to pay attention to the specific number.

Gretchen: Whereas being really precise can say, okay, here’s a more specific way of naming something. If you describe a person as “big” or “tall,” you can be like, okay, well, that could be a pretty large range of heights, but say they’re above six feet or something, whereas if you describe someone as “This person is six feet tall,” or if you describe someone as “This person is exactly two metres and eleven centimetres and one millimetre tall,” yeah, you can be more and more specific. I think if somebody says, “I’m five foot eleven and three quarters,” you’re like, “Okay, you’re really making a lot of points here not to say that you’re six feet tall because you don’t wanna claim that extra quarter inch or something.”

Lauren: I also know that I get called “tall” when I’m in countries like Nepal because, again, a word like “tall” is very relative. But in the context of my family or professional basketball players, I am in no way tall. Then, specific heights are actually more informative depending on the context that you’re in.

Gretchen: It depends on, again, if you’re looking for the social context of being tall because everyone else around you is much taller or much shorter versus the literal context of “Will you fit through this doorway without banging your head?” or “You must be this tall to ride the ride at the amusement park.”

Lauren: We can even more completely beyond quantity and still have these scales that have all these implications that come with them. If I said, “I believe that Gretchen has some confectionary she’s not telling me about” versus “I know that Gretchen has some confectionary she’s not telling me about,” there’s very different weights to how certain I am about exactly what lollies you’re keeping from me.

Gretchen: Yeah, if you believe I have a secret chocolate stash versus if you know I have a secret chocolate stash, one of those is a bit more of an accusation.

Lauren: Yeah, because I have more certainty – I have some amount of evidence, I guess – of this secret stash. We can plot words like “I believe” and “I think” and “I know” relative to each other.

Gretchen: Or with something like “I wonder.” You could even go weaker than that. “I suppose that you have a secret chocolate stash.” That’s really much more doubtful. You can have this scale of certitude.

Lauren: We have these as words in English, but in languages like Yolmo, where I work with the evidential system of the language, the grammar of the language has baked in “I saw that this thing happened” or “I was told that this thing happened” or “I know from my own personal experience of it that this thing happened.” A lot of work on evidentiality puts these different types of evidence that you have a scale. A lot of the scales try and be really absolute about it. Like, knowing because you saw something is definitely higher than knowing because someone told you. I like thinking about things in relative context. I think you telling me something about your own personal experience is probably a higher value of knowledge than me seeing and concocting some story about something in terms of your personal experience of it.

Gretchen: If I tell you that I’m hungry, that’s probably better information than if you just see me eating something because maybe I’m eating it because I’m bored or I know I’m gonna be hungry later, so I might as well just finish this, or something like that.

Lauren: Even for these non-quantity-based scales, as always, context – so important.

Gretchen: Another scale that I hadn’t really thought about until I saw the linguist Elizabeth Pankratz tweeted about it on Twitter is the idea of using various kinds of smiley-face emoji as a scale of precision or a scale of relevance here. There’s a slightly smiling face emoji which is just two dots and a little curve for the mouth. In theory, it should be kind of like a smiley-face. This should be an emoji you can just use to convey a smile. But in practice, it doesn’t get used as much as the more elaborate smiling faces where the eyes are doing something, or there’s tears of joy, or the mouth is doing something bigger, or something like that.

Lauren: There are more smiling face emoji than I think people realise until they go in and have to pick one. Then suddenly they have this scale of how happy am I – am I eyes closed, full mouth grin, big teeth happy? It’s hard to put yourself on a scale, which makes me think that maybe that’s why face with tears of joy became so useful because people are like, “I can’t choose between all these different smiles. I’ll just go for the one that is so obviously delighted by the situation.”

Gretchen: You can spot it among all the other ones that have subtle differences in the mouths and cheeks and, especially on different platforms, you don’t necessarily know which one someone else has used if you wanna mirror theirs, whereas face with tears of joy – it always has those tear-shaped dots in the corner, so it has a relatively distinctive look on different platforms.

Lauren: You never get this problem with emoticons because you have the, like, right bracket parenthese canonical smile, and then you have the capital D big grin :D. That’s it. You have so much less space to move in. I think that’s why the classic smiling emoticon still feels fine in a way that the classic smiling smiley-face emoji feels underwhelming.

Gretchen: Right. Maybe people are more reliable to draw this inference of, okay, you didn’t use the fancier smiling face, so you must’ve meant that you didn’t actually feel as positive as you might have when there’s so many obvious alternatives of the more elaborate emoji that you could be using, whereas because it’s harder to create more elaborate smiling faces – I mean, you do have :D, or several parentheses :))), or something like that.

Lauren: This is true.

Gretchen: It’s not as obvious all of the different versions you could be doing instead.

Lauren: Whether it’s emoji or temperature or eggs, one of the things that these scales all seem to have in common is that where you choose to put yourself on the scale creates these implications.

Gretchen: What’s interesting about a statement like, “The coffee is warm,” is that I could follow it up with a more precise statement, a more extreme statement. I could say, “The coffee is warm. In fact, it’s hot.” That comes across as providing more precise information. It’s not a weird contradiction. If I said, “The coffee is warm. In fact, it’s iced,” you’d be like, “Wait a second. No. Not both of those things are possible.” Or if I said, “The coffee is in a red cup. In fact, it’s in a blue cup,” you’d be like, “No. No, no, no. You can’t just – no.” But I can do that with “The coffee is warm. In fact, it’s hot” even though, normally speaking, if I say something like, “The coffee is warm,” you would assume that I’m trying to imply that it’s not hot. I can actually go in and cancel that assumption or that implicature by providing more precise information. That’s this very specific relationship that these types of meanings that are on a scale have. The same thing with something like “believe” versus “know.” I can say, “I believe Jane has a secret chocolate stash. In fact, I know she does,” even though normally, “I believe Jane has a secret chocolate stash” just implies that I don’t actually know for a fact. I can then go in, and I cancel that implicature by saying, “No, no, no, I actually do know this.”

Lauren: But it doesn’t work in the opposite direction. I can’t say, “I know Jane has a secret chocolate stash,” and people are like, “Oh, how do you know?” Like, “Well, because I believe that she does” is a case suddenly falling apart.

Gretchen: Exactly. There are other words that actually exist on a scale of specificity when you think about it. If I say, “I’m gonna go to the movies with John or Bill,” I could follow that with “In fact, I’m gonna go with both of them.” But the initial statement seems to imply I’ll go to the movies with either John or Bill but not both of them. I can cancel that by saying, “Oh, yeah, in fact, I’m actually gonna do it this way.” It does seem to imply not both of them because if I’d known that I was gonna go with both of them, I could’ve just said “and.” We have a word “and.” It’s perfectly good at doing that thing. If I had known that “and” was likely to be true, I could’ve said that. That’s why we have this word “and/or” where people are like, I know that normally “or” could include “and,” but it probably doesn’t, so I wanna be a little bit stronger and insert something else that’s in between these two to really make it obvious that it could be “and” even though, technically, it would still be true if I had said, “I’ll go with John or Bill, and both of them were free, so I went with both of them.” It also creates that scale where the other members of the scale or the more specific members of that scale aren’t implied even though they could show up along the way.

Lauren: We use these implied contextual pieces of information all the time. It’s so hard to break our minds out of the way that these implications are sitting along a scale that sometimes it can be hard to wrap your head around those examples until you break them out into a specific context like that.

Gretchen: Another example of how these implicatures are so ingrained is if you have a statement like, “I ate some of the cookies.” We can set up a scenario where we’ve got a cookie jar, and I go in, and I say, “Oh, well, I’ve eaten some of the cookies, so they won’t all be left.” And then you open up the jar, and you’re like, “You ate all of them.” I’m like, “Well, you know, I ate some. In fact, I ate all of them.” Again, there isn’t a contradiction here the way there would be if you did it in the inverse. Like, “I ate all the cookies. In fact, I ate some of them.” You’re like, “Wait.”

Lauren: “Why are there still some left? I’m very confused.”

Gretchen: That one doesn’t work. But this order – “I ate some. In fact, I ate all” – that is just cancelling an implicature. It’s not actually falsifying the actual thing that you said.

Lauren: I always feel like this is the point where linguists and legal scholars both get excited because it’s just like, “Oh, yes. The sum defence in cookie taking.”

Gretchen: I think this is one of the things that lawyers get trained to do is paying attention to the actual stated information even though normally when we talk to each other all of these levels of implicature do come around for the ride. There is a really fun version of this that you can do with numbers. My favourite example of this is this gif which I have analysed before for linguistic purposes because I really like this gif. It also shows up in Crash Course Linguistics, so I love this example so much. There’s a gif that has this vast sea of ducks. They’re on a street in China for reasons that are not quite clear to me. This is a news broadcast that’s clearly like, “There’re all these ducks here. What the heck’s going on?” This gif showed up on Tumblr. Somebody had commented under it, “Look at all these ducks. There are at least 10.”

Lauren: [Laughs] You have actually talked about it on the show before as well, but it is such a great example of implicature and, specifically, of this number-based implicature. It makes me laugh every time.

Gretchen: Somebody replied on Tumblr saying, “Well, you’re not wrong.” Because technically speaking, you know, here’s probably thousands of ducks is at least 10 ducks. It’s just that this is so uninformative. It so clearly implies that you don’t know a more specific number when you very clearly do know a more specific number if you’re looking at this gif. It’s this tension between the implied meeting and the literal meaning that creates the humour there.

Lauren: Un-useful to the point of comedy. A lot of comedy plays with this implied meaning and twists it in ways that go against our usual expectations of how the implicature rolls out.

Gretchen: There’s another example of this from the BBC radio comedy Cabin Pressure, which I’m an enormous fan of. One of the characters who’s a little bit not very good at implicatures says, “I can read people like a book.” Another character says, “Have you ever read a book, Arthur?” And Arthur says, “Yes, actually, White Fang. Twice.”

Lauren: I thought that was just a generic use of a book, and Arthur is treating it as an actual, canonical number.

Gretchen: Right. Generally, people would expect, you know, “Have you read a book?” to be answered in the tens or the hundreds or maybe the thousands. Most people who’ve read a book have read many books. But Arthur’s like, “Yeah, here’s the book that I have read.” In a different context, you can use this “a whatever” can potentially mean “a single one” or can potentially mean “more than one” and, pragmatically, it still makes sense. If you say, for example, “If you have a child, you can take advantage of our complimentary day care service.” And then someone could say, “Oh, yes, I have a child.” And somebody could say, “I have two children.” That’s fine. Normally, you wouldn’t necessarily say that one child implies that you might also have two, but in the context of “Do you wanna take advantage of the complementary day care service?”, it’s not suddenly that you have two children, and it doesn’t work for you anymore.

Lauren: Arthur isn’t the only person that can struggle with how things fit on a scale. This is something that children take quite a while to get their heads around as well, especially with those words that we were talking about earlier like “some” or “a few” that are very much context dependent.

Gretchen: There’s a really cute experiment testing kids on what kinds of things they can infer from context and from what’s being said. They have some kids, and they have some plates of cookies. In one case, they’ll have a researcher or a puppet or something say, “I ate the sugar cookies.” From that, the four- and five-year-olds do understand that that person is trying to imply not the chocolate chip ones. If you say, “I ate the cookies,” that means you could’ve eaten any kind. But if you specified which kind of cookies you ate, that probably means that you didn’t eat the ones you didn’t specify. But if you say, “I ate some of the cookies,” they don’t necessarily understand that means “not all.”

Lauren: I always love these experiments because it shows that language learning continues so much longer than just being able to put a grammatical sentence together and that these words are actually hard to conceptualise on a scale. Part of why it is something that takes so long is because you just need lots and lots of examples of how “some” means a particular thing in some contexts and something else in other contexts. In fact, some of the studies seem to let children improve their sense of what “some” means by the end of the experiment because it’s possibly the first time that children have received these nice, concrete examples of how much more or less “some” is in a given context.

Gretchen: There’s an example from a study from Skordos and Papafragou which says if you do the “I ate all the cookies – what does this mean?”, “I ate the sugar cookies – what does this mean?” example, and then you give the children an example with “I ate some – what does this mean?”, if you present them in that order, they actually do better because you’ve given them these very concrete examples about “What does this mean? What are the possible alternatives to what I could be implying here?” Whereas if you do them in the other order, they don’t do as well with the “some” before the “all.”

Lauren: Such a fun constraint to have to think up in your study design. Like, we accidentally taught children more than they knew at the start of the experiment.

Gretchen: They think it’s because you can teach them this in an hour, which they’ll gradually acquire through the course of their life, but if you give them this very focused practice for an hour, then suddenly they’re performing much more like adults because now they’ve learned it.

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.”

Gretchen: Sometimes bringing something up implies that it’s relevant. We did an episode about the Gricean Maxims. This is talking about, okay, here’s something that’s relevant, which is also totally a type of implicature.

Lauren: If you get to listen to the Gricean Maxims episode soon then scalar implicature is normally about a maxim of quantity because you’re not giving a sufficiently clear indication of the relevant point on a scale, or you’re playing with people’s expectations about the quantity of information that you’re giving, like suggesting that at least 10 ducks are in a photo of thousands of ducks.

Gretchen: Can I give you two more of my favourite examples of scalar implicature and how it can be used for humorous effect?

Lauren: Yes, please.

Gretchen: One of them is from somebody who’s googled the number of squid species and has found at least five, which I am not a squid biologist, but this person informs me that they’re off by two orders of magnitude.

Lauren: Technically, not wrong. Not particularly right either.

Gretchen: The other example of scalar implicature which you don’t have to know squid facts about is a tweet from the account @awhalefact which gives us the very helpful whale fact that many whales were never taught how to drive stick shift.

Lauren: Uh. I mean, I guess I don’t need to fact check this fact. I guess the joke here is coming from the fact that we’re used to “many” being something on a scale that’s relevant, but no whales have learnt to drive stick shift, and so anything along this scale is absurd.

Gretchen: “Many” implies “not all” because if you knew that it was “all,” you could’ve just said “all.” We know that it’s “All whales have not been taught how to drive stick shift” because whales can’t drive cars. But “many” brings up in your mind, “Wait. I thought none of them had. Does that mean there’re some whales that have been taught how to drive stick shift?” In addition to the general non-scalar implicature that whales can even be taught how to drive at all and that you need to specify “stick shift,” like, “Many whales know how to drive an automatic.”

Lauren: Once you start noticing scales, you realise that they pop up all over the place whether that’s absolute numerical scales or more relative semantic scales that you might not even have thought of as being put on a scale until you start thinking about the relationship between different words.

Gretchen: Once you start noticing the scales, you can then start finding scalar implicature jokes everywhere you go.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get kiki bouba scarves, “What the Fricative” t-shirts, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes, and you wish there were more? You can get access to 56 bonus episodes to listen to right now at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and other rewards as well as helping keep the show ad-free. Recent bonus topics include linguistic illusions, linguistics on Wikipedia, and an interview with Emily Gref from the Planet Word Museum. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life, especially during this month, our anniversary month.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Managing Producer is Liz McCullough, and our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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