I am a Senior Scientist at the Laboratoire Linguistique Formelle, under the auspices of the CNRS (Le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) and the Université de Paris. I received my undergraduate degree in Psychology from Binghamton in 1984 and my Master’s and PhD in Experimental Psychology from NYU (1987, 1992), with a focus on human reasoning. Through my investigations into the psychology of reasoning, it became clear that linguistic approaches, and specifically those offered by semantics and pragmatics, were indispensable for better understanding a participant's performance. This led to a research program in the mid- to late-1990's called Experimental Pragmatics that was developed in collaboration with Dan Sperber.While focusing on inference-making related to logical terms, I also investigate pragmatics more generally, with research interests extending to figurative and conventional language. My book, Experimental Pragmatics: The making of a cognitive science (Cambridge University Press), came out in 2018.
Like many languages, European French has a contrapositive response option (Si) to reject the nega... more Like many languages, European French has a contrapositive response option (Si) to reject the negative content of a question and to express accord with the questioner’s implicit affirmative. Consider the question “Barack does not eat meat?” (in French) where the response Si indicates that he does. In-spired by Gricean analyses, we view Si as an expression that includes a pragmatic component. Based on extant studies that typically show that a pragmatic inference is cognitively costly, we predicted that the articulation of Si ought to appear costly compared to felicitous Oui and Non answers. We created an original task that enjoins a participant to remove a box’s cover (while searching for a candy) before hearing a puppet’s question. In the critical Negative-Si (NS) condition, the participant finds the candy in, say, a white box (when two boxes are under consideration) and the interlocutor-puppet’s negative question is It is not in the white box? Besides rates of accurate responses, our main dependent variable was Response Reaction Times (RRT’s), viz. the time to naturally voice an answer (Si in this case). Controls were the Affirmative-Oui (AO), Affirmative-Non (AN), and Negative-Non (NN) condi-tions. Importantly, the puppet began each trial with one of three kinds of prior belief, a) by declaring that the candy is surely in, or; b) surely not in, the to-be-presented box or; c) by saying “I don’t know where it is.” These were included to determine whether answerers consider the questioner’s prior ep-istemic state when responding. Experiment 1 compared 6-year-olds to adults and found that i) profi-cient uses of Si are costly with respect to the other three conditions and that; ii) answers in the wake of a “I don’t know where it is” prompt slowdowns when compared to the other two declarations. Both findings are consistent with our pre-registered predictions. Four-year-olds, investigated in Experiment 2, pattern almost identically with the 6-year-olds, with one major exception. Their fastest response oc-curs when answering Si, leading to a unique developmental effect. Our account for this finding is that four-year-olds rely on a minimally semantic representation of Si, which encodes disagreement be-tween the negative content of the question and the facts. We propose that there are pragmatic process-es intrinsic to Si – which ultimately signals agreement with the questioner’s implicit affirmative -- and that mastering these requires greater maturity.
This review of Mercier and Sperber's The Enigma of Reason presents some recent (and at times pers... more This review of Mercier and Sperber's The Enigma of Reason presents some recent (and at times personal) history of the Reasoning literature in order to underline how innovative their Argumentative Theory is and to provide the backdrop to three comments. The first comment addresses their deflationary view of deductive inference-making -- which presents deductive abilities as so run-of-the-mill that they are not differentiable from other lower-order intuitions. I take issue with this characterization and describe five strands of positive research showing that fundamental deductive inference-making affords regularities in behavior that sets it apart from other kinds of inference-making discussed in the context of Reasoning. The second comment is concerned with experimentally related issues, such as the sort of predictions that follow from Argumentative Theory and that would make it falsifiable (specifically, which reasoning problems would benefit from deliberation?). The third comment addresses the notion of explanations. Reasoning labs have long been reticent to incorporate participants' explanations into their accounts for philosophical, empirical and historical reasons. Researchers would benefit if the Argumentative Theory were to better clarify what sort of explanations are beneficial for experimental purposes.
Commitment plays a crucial role in the stabilization of communication. While commitment increases... more Commitment plays a crucial role in the stabilization of communication. While commitment increases the acceptance of the message communicated, it comes with a price: the greater the commitment, the greater the cost (direct or reputational) the speakers incur if the message is found unreliable (Vullioud et al., 2017). This opens up the question of which linguistic cues hearers deploy in order to infer speaker commitment in communication. We present a series of empirical studies to test the hypothesis that distinct meaning-relations e saying, presupposing and implicating e act as pragmatic cues of speaker commitment. Our results demonstrate that, after a message p is found to be false, speakers incur different reputational costs as a function of whether p had been explicitly stated, presupposed, or implicated. All else being equal, participants are significantly more likely to selectively trust the speaker who implicated p than the speaker who asserted or presupposed p. These results provide the first empirical evidence that commitment is modulated by different meaning-relations, and shed a new light on the strategic advantages of implicit communication. Speakers can decrease the reputational damages they incur by conveying unreliable messages when these are implicitly communicated.
1. Reviews inference-difficulty claims and findings from the mental-model approach to understandi... more 1. Reviews inference-difficulty claims and findings from the mental-model approach to understanding propositional reasoning. This is followed by a discussion concerning how claims from mental models differ from those of mental logic and how one can practically test between them. Finally, we report a study in which we directly compare predictions from 2 theories in 1 overarching procedure. 124 undergraduate students were presented problem sets which concerned either People-in-cities or Letters said to be written on an index card. ...
We present a set-theoretic model of the mental representation of classically quantified sentences... more We present a set-theoretic model of the mental representation of classically quantified sentences (All P are Q, Some P are Q, Some P are not Q, and No P are Q). We take inclusion, exclusion, and their negations to be primitive concepts. We show that although these sentences are known to have a diagrammatic expression (in the form of the Gergonne circles) that constitutes a semantic representation, these concepts can also be expressed syntactically in the form of algebraic formulas. We hypothesized that the ...
Interlocutors converge on names to refer to entities. For example, a speaker might refer to a nov... more Interlocutors converge on names to refer to entities. For example, a speaker might refer to a novel looking object as the jellyfish and, once identified, the listener will too. The hypothesized mechanism behind such referential precedents is a subject of debate. The common ground view claims that listeners register the object as well as the identity of the speaker who coined the label. The linguistic view claims that, once established, precedents are treated by listeners like any other linguistic unit, i.e. without needing to keep track of the speaker. To test predictions from each account, we used visual-world eyetracking, which allows observations in real time, during a standard referential communication task. Participants had to select objects based on instructions from two speakers. In the critical condition, listeners sought an object with a negative reference such as not the jellyfish. We aimed to determine the extent to which listeners rely on the linguistic input, common ground or both. We found that initial interpretations were based on linguistic processing only and that common ground considerations do emerge but only after 1000 ms. Our findings support the idea that—at least temporally—linguistic processing can be isolated from common ground.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Aug 2016
Learners of most languages are faced with the task of acquiring words to talk about number and qu... more Learners of most languages are faced with the task of acquiring words to talk about number and quantity. Much is known about the order of acquisition of number words and the cognitive and perceptual systems and cultural practices that shape it. Substantially less is known about the acquisition of quantifiers. Here we consider systems and practices that support number word acquisition in order to determine that their relevance to quantifiers is limited. Instead, we propose that a major constraint in the acquisition of quantifiers comes from their rich and varied meaning. We investigate competence with the expressions for 'all', 'none', 'some', 'some…not' and 'most' in 31 languages, representing 11 language types, by testing 768 5-year-old children and 536 adults. The findings reveal four dimensions of the meaning and use of quantifiers that constrain the order of acquisition in similar ways across languages in our sample. In addition, exploratory analyses reveal that language-and learner-specific factors, such as negative concord and gender, are significant predictors of variation. language acquisition | universals | meaning | quantification
Learners of most languages are faced with the task of acquiring words to talk about number and qu... more Learners of most languages are faced with the task of acquiring words to talk about number and quantity. Much is known about the order of acquisition of number words as well as the cogni-tive and perceptual systems and cultural practices that shape it. Substantially less is known about the acquisition of quantifiers. Here we consider the extent to which systems and practices that support number word acquisition can be applied to quantifier acquisition and conclude that the two domains are largely distinct in this respect. Consequently, we hypothesize that the acquisition of quantifiers is constrained by a set of factors related to each quantifier's specific meaning. We investigate competence with the expressions for 'all', 'none', 'some', 'some…not' and 'most' in 31 languages, representing 11 language types, by testing 768 5-year-old children and 536 adults. We found a cross-linguistically similar order of acquisition of quantifiers, explicable in terms of four factors relating to their meaning and use. In addition, exploratory analyses reveal that language-and learner-specific factors, such as negative concord and gender, are significant predictors of variation. language acquisition | universals | quantifiers | semantics | prag-matics
This paper explores the impact of group affiliation with respect to the on-line processing and ap... more This paper explores the impact of group affiliation with respect to the on-line processing and appreciation of jokes, using facial electromyography (EMG) activity and offline evaluations as dependent measures. Two experiments were conducted in which group affiliation varied between the participant and each of two independent (recorded confederate) speakers whose described political profiles were distinguished through one word: “Right” versus “Left.” Experiment 1 showed that jokes were more highly evaluated and that associated EMG activity was more intense when it was later determined that the speaker was a member of the listener’s ingroup rather than outgroup. In an effort to determine whether these parochial effects can be isolated to ingroup favoritism as opposed to outgroup derogation, Experiment 2 paired a joke-teller described as politically active (either from the right or the left) with one who was described as politically neutral. These more subtle comparisons suggest that the parochial effects observed in our joke understanding paradigm are mediated, at least in part, by the presence of an outgroup member.
Relational reasoning (A. B, B. C, therefore A. C) shares a number of similarities with numerical ... more Relational reasoning (A. B, B. C, therefore A. C) shares a number of similarities with numerical cognition, including a common behavioural signature, the symbolic distance effect. Just as reaction times for evaluating relational conclusions decrease as the distance between two ordered objects increases, people need less time to compare two numbers when they are distant (e.g., 2 and 8) than
Children's art was studied as a function of (1) gender of child, (2) picture conditi... more Children's art was studied as a function of (1) gender of child, (2) picture condition (drawings of same-sex versus mixed-sex dyads), and (3) child-rearing setting (US town [N = 89] versus Israeli town [N = 132] versus Israeli kibbutz [N = 88]). Pictures were scored for theme or ...
Like many languages, European French has a contrapositive response option (Si) to reject the nega... more Like many languages, European French has a contrapositive response option (Si) to reject the negative content of a question and to express accord with the questioner’s implicit affirmative. Consider the question “Barack does not eat meat?” (in French) where the response Si indicates that he does. In-spired by Gricean analyses, we view Si as an expression that includes a pragmatic component. Based on extant studies that typically show that a pragmatic inference is cognitively costly, we predicted that the articulation of Si ought to appear costly compared to felicitous Oui and Non answers. We created an original task that enjoins a participant to remove a box’s cover (while searching for a candy) before hearing a puppet’s question. In the critical Negative-Si (NS) condition, the participant finds the candy in, say, a white box (when two boxes are under consideration) and the interlocutor-puppet’s negative question is It is not in the white box? Besides rates of accurate responses, our main dependent variable was Response Reaction Times (RRT’s), viz. the time to naturally voice an answer (Si in this case). Controls were the Affirmative-Oui (AO), Affirmative-Non (AN), and Negative-Non (NN) condi-tions. Importantly, the puppet began each trial with one of three kinds of prior belief, a) by declaring that the candy is surely in, or; b) surely not in, the to-be-presented box or; c) by saying “I don’t know where it is.” These were included to determine whether answerers consider the questioner’s prior ep-istemic state when responding. Experiment 1 compared 6-year-olds to adults and found that i) profi-cient uses of Si are costly with respect to the other three conditions and that; ii) answers in the wake of a “I don’t know where it is” prompt slowdowns when compared to the other two declarations. Both findings are consistent with our pre-registered predictions. Four-year-olds, investigated in Experiment 2, pattern almost identically with the 6-year-olds, with one major exception. Their fastest response oc-curs when answering Si, leading to a unique developmental effect. Our account for this finding is that four-year-olds rely on a minimally semantic representation of Si, which encodes disagreement be-tween the negative content of the question and the facts. We propose that there are pragmatic process-es intrinsic to Si – which ultimately signals agreement with the questioner’s implicit affirmative -- and that mastering these requires greater maturity.
This review of Mercier and Sperber's The Enigma of Reason presents some recent (and at times pers... more This review of Mercier and Sperber's The Enigma of Reason presents some recent (and at times personal) history of the Reasoning literature in order to underline how innovative their Argumentative Theory is and to provide the backdrop to three comments. The first comment addresses their deflationary view of deductive inference-making -- which presents deductive abilities as so run-of-the-mill that they are not differentiable from other lower-order intuitions. I take issue with this characterization and describe five strands of positive research showing that fundamental deductive inference-making affords regularities in behavior that sets it apart from other kinds of inference-making discussed in the context of Reasoning. The second comment is concerned with experimentally related issues, such as the sort of predictions that follow from Argumentative Theory and that would make it falsifiable (specifically, which reasoning problems would benefit from deliberation?). The third comment addresses the notion of explanations. Reasoning labs have long been reticent to incorporate participants' explanations into their accounts for philosophical, empirical and historical reasons. Researchers would benefit if the Argumentative Theory were to better clarify what sort of explanations are beneficial for experimental purposes.
Commitment plays a crucial role in the stabilization of communication. While commitment increases... more Commitment plays a crucial role in the stabilization of communication. While commitment increases the acceptance of the message communicated, it comes with a price: the greater the commitment, the greater the cost (direct or reputational) the speakers incur if the message is found unreliable (Vullioud et al., 2017). This opens up the question of which linguistic cues hearers deploy in order to infer speaker commitment in communication. We present a series of empirical studies to test the hypothesis that distinct meaning-relations e saying, presupposing and implicating e act as pragmatic cues of speaker commitment. Our results demonstrate that, after a message p is found to be false, speakers incur different reputational costs as a function of whether p had been explicitly stated, presupposed, or implicated. All else being equal, participants are significantly more likely to selectively trust the speaker who implicated p than the speaker who asserted or presupposed p. These results provide the first empirical evidence that commitment is modulated by different meaning-relations, and shed a new light on the strategic advantages of implicit communication. Speakers can decrease the reputational damages they incur by conveying unreliable messages when these are implicitly communicated.
1. Reviews inference-difficulty claims and findings from the mental-model approach to understandi... more 1. Reviews inference-difficulty claims and findings from the mental-model approach to understanding propositional reasoning. This is followed by a discussion concerning how claims from mental models differ from those of mental logic and how one can practically test between them. Finally, we report a study in which we directly compare predictions from 2 theories in 1 overarching procedure. 124 undergraduate students were presented problem sets which concerned either People-in-cities or Letters said to be written on an index card. ...
We present a set-theoretic model of the mental representation of classically quantified sentences... more We present a set-theoretic model of the mental representation of classically quantified sentences (All P are Q, Some P are Q, Some P are not Q, and No P are Q). We take inclusion, exclusion, and their negations to be primitive concepts. We show that although these sentences are known to have a diagrammatic expression (in the form of the Gergonne circles) that constitutes a semantic representation, these concepts can also be expressed syntactically in the form of algebraic formulas. We hypothesized that the ...
Interlocutors converge on names to refer to entities. For example, a speaker might refer to a nov... more Interlocutors converge on names to refer to entities. For example, a speaker might refer to a novel looking object as the jellyfish and, once identified, the listener will too. The hypothesized mechanism behind such referential precedents is a subject of debate. The common ground view claims that listeners register the object as well as the identity of the speaker who coined the label. The linguistic view claims that, once established, precedents are treated by listeners like any other linguistic unit, i.e. without needing to keep track of the speaker. To test predictions from each account, we used visual-world eyetracking, which allows observations in real time, during a standard referential communication task. Participants had to select objects based on instructions from two speakers. In the critical condition, listeners sought an object with a negative reference such as not the jellyfish. We aimed to determine the extent to which listeners rely on the linguistic input, common ground or both. We found that initial interpretations were based on linguistic processing only and that common ground considerations do emerge but only after 1000 ms. Our findings support the idea that—at least temporally—linguistic processing can be isolated from common ground.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Aug 2016
Learners of most languages are faced with the task of acquiring words to talk about number and qu... more Learners of most languages are faced with the task of acquiring words to talk about number and quantity. Much is known about the order of acquisition of number words and the cognitive and perceptual systems and cultural practices that shape it. Substantially less is known about the acquisition of quantifiers. Here we consider systems and practices that support number word acquisition in order to determine that their relevance to quantifiers is limited. Instead, we propose that a major constraint in the acquisition of quantifiers comes from their rich and varied meaning. We investigate competence with the expressions for 'all', 'none', 'some', 'some…not' and 'most' in 31 languages, representing 11 language types, by testing 768 5-year-old children and 536 adults. The findings reveal four dimensions of the meaning and use of quantifiers that constrain the order of acquisition in similar ways across languages in our sample. In addition, exploratory analyses reveal that language-and learner-specific factors, such as negative concord and gender, are significant predictors of variation. language acquisition | universals | meaning | quantification
Learners of most languages are faced with the task of acquiring words to talk about number and qu... more Learners of most languages are faced with the task of acquiring words to talk about number and quantity. Much is known about the order of acquisition of number words as well as the cogni-tive and perceptual systems and cultural practices that shape it. Substantially less is known about the acquisition of quantifiers. Here we consider the extent to which systems and practices that support number word acquisition can be applied to quantifier acquisition and conclude that the two domains are largely distinct in this respect. Consequently, we hypothesize that the acquisition of quantifiers is constrained by a set of factors related to each quantifier's specific meaning. We investigate competence with the expressions for 'all', 'none', 'some', 'some…not' and 'most' in 31 languages, representing 11 language types, by testing 768 5-year-old children and 536 adults. We found a cross-linguistically similar order of acquisition of quantifiers, explicable in terms of four factors relating to their meaning and use. In addition, exploratory analyses reveal that language-and learner-specific factors, such as negative concord and gender, are significant predictors of variation. language acquisition | universals | quantifiers | semantics | prag-matics
This paper explores the impact of group affiliation with respect to the on-line processing and ap... more This paper explores the impact of group affiliation with respect to the on-line processing and appreciation of jokes, using facial electromyography (EMG) activity and offline evaluations as dependent measures. Two experiments were conducted in which group affiliation varied between the participant and each of two independent (recorded confederate) speakers whose described political profiles were distinguished through one word: “Right” versus “Left.” Experiment 1 showed that jokes were more highly evaluated and that associated EMG activity was more intense when it was later determined that the speaker was a member of the listener’s ingroup rather than outgroup. In an effort to determine whether these parochial effects can be isolated to ingroup favoritism as opposed to outgroup derogation, Experiment 2 paired a joke-teller described as politically active (either from the right or the left) with one who was described as politically neutral. These more subtle comparisons suggest that the parochial effects observed in our joke understanding paradigm are mediated, at least in part, by the presence of an outgroup member.
Relational reasoning (A. B, B. C, therefore A. C) shares a number of similarities with numerical ... more Relational reasoning (A. B, B. C, therefore A. C) shares a number of similarities with numerical cognition, including a common behavioural signature, the symbolic distance effect. Just as reaction times for evaluating relational conclusions decrease as the distance between two ordered objects increases, people need less time to compare two numbers when they are distant (e.g., 2 and 8) than
Children's art was studied as a function of (1) gender of child, (2) picture conditi... more Children's art was studied as a function of (1) gender of child, (2) picture condition (drawings of same-sex versus mixed-sex dyads), and (3) child-rearing setting (US town [N = 89] versus Israeli town [N = 132] versus Israeli kibbutz [N = 88]). Pictures were scored for theme or ...
<HTML> <head> <title>Introduction to <i>Experimental Pragmatics</i></title> </head> <... more <HTML> <head> <title>Introduction to <i>Experimental Pragmatics</i></title> </head> <body> [IMAGE] (To appear in I. Noveck & D. Sperber eds.
This volume contains five chapters that discuss experimential evidence relating to implicatures. ... more This volume contains five chapters that discuss experimential evidence relating to implicatures. The kind of implicatures relevant here are conversational implicatures. According to H. Paul Grice, who introduced this notion in 'Logic and conversation'(1967 [1989]), such implicatures originate from the literal meaning of expressions and the fact that speakers follow certain rules in uttering them.
“Although a few pioneers in psycholinguistics had, for more than twenty years, approached various... more “Although a few pioneers in psycholinguistics had, for more than twenty years, approached various pragmatic issues experimentally, it is only in the past few years that investigators have begun employing the experimental method in testing pragmatic hypotheses (see Noveck & Sperber 2004). We see this emergence of a proper experimental pragmatics as an important advance with a great potential for further development.
Imaginez que vous essayez d'assembler un puzzle. Comment allez-vous vous y prendre? Vous pourriez... more Imaginez que vous essayez d'assembler un puzzle. Comment allez-vous vous y prendre? Vous pourriez d'abord commencer par les coins qui servent de points d'ancrage—ils sont aisément reconnaissables et il n'y en a que quatre. Vous pourriez ensuite repérer les couleurs les plus saillantes ou d'autres caractéristiques remarquables partagées par plusieurs pièces. Enfin, le plus difficile sera d'examiner les pièces intermédiaires afin de décider comment et où elles pourraient être placées.
Il est généralement tentant de présenter le raisonnement comme un partenaire de la logique: après... more Il est généralement tentant de présenter le raisonnement comme un partenaire de la logique: après tout, les réponses correctes dans les tâches de raisonnement sont fondées sur des normes logiques et les erreurs sont des indications d'un raisonnement incorrect. Cette perspective est indispensable dans la mesure où la logique constitue l'arrière plan pour l'évaluation des résultats du raisonnement.
In a very broad sense, pragmatics is the study of language use. It encompasses loosely related re... more In a very broad sense, pragmatics is the study of language use. It encompasses loosely related research programmes ranging from formal studies of deictic expressions to sociological studies of ethnic verbal stereotypes. In a more focused sense, pragmatics is the study of how linguistic properties and contextual factors interact in the interpretation of utterances. We will be using “pragmatics” only in this narrower sense.
An utterance such as ' Show me the large rabbit ' potentially generates a CONTRASTIVE INFERENCE, ... more An utterance such as ' Show me the large rabbit ' potentially generates a CONTRASTIVE INFERENCE, i.e., the article the and the adjective large allow listeners to pragmatically infer the existence of other entities having the same noun (e.g. a small rabbit). The primary way to measure children's ability to carry out this pragmatic inference has been through tasks that measure infelicity detection. We argue that such studies are not as revealing as one might assume because they force children to adopt a metalinguistic stance and they consider infelicity detection as tantamount to contrastive inference-making. To address these concerns, we develop a game-like situation in which all utterances remain felicitous. Moreover, we make a distinction between responses that are revealing of a pragmatic interpretation and responses that are revealing of a reliance on the utterance's LINGUISTICALLY ENCODED meaning (i.e., a lack of contrastive inference). Three experiments with seven-year-olds, ten-year-olds, and adults show that pragmatic interpretations do not emerge among seven-year-olds, that ten-year-olds do not show adult-like performance, and that adults are not at ceiling. We conclude that contrastive inference-making is an effortful process and that the ability to detect such gains-in-information through language increases with age.
A negative reference, such as "not the sculpture" (where the sculpture is a name the speaker had ... more A negative reference, such as "not the sculpture" (where the sculpture is a name the speaker had only just invented to describe an unconventional-looking object and where the negation is saying that she does not currently desire that object), seems like a perilous and linguistically underdetermined way to point to another object, especially when there are three objects to choose from. To succeed, it obliges listeners to rely on contextual elements to determine which object the speaker has in mind. Prior work has shown that pragmatic inference-making plays a crucial role in such an interpretation process. When a negative reference leaves two candidate objects to choose from, listeners avoid an object that had been previously named, preferring instead an unconventional-looking object that had remained unnamed (Kronmüller et al., 2017). In the present study, we build over these findings by maintaining our focus on the two remaining objects (what we call the second and third objects) as we systematically vary two features. With respect to the second object-which is always unconventional looking-we vary whether or not it has been given a name. With respect to the third object-which is never named-we vary whether it is unconventional or conventional looking (for the latter, imagine an object that clearly resembles a bicycle). As revealed by selection patterns and eye-movements in a visual-world eye-tracking paradigm, we replicate our previous findings that show that participants choose randomly when both of the remaining objects are unconventional looking and unnamed and that they opt reliably in favor of the most nondescript (the unnamed unconventional looking) object when the second object is named. We show further that (unnamed) conventional-looking objects provide similar outcomes when juxtaposed with an unnamed unconventional object (participants prefer the most nondescript as opposed to the conventional-looking object). Nevertheless, effects emerging from the conventional (unnamed) case are not as strong as those found with respect to those reported when an unconventional object is named. In describing participants' choices in the non-random cases, we propose that addressees rely on the construction of an ad hoc implicature that takes into account which object can be eliminated from consideration, given that the speaker did not explicitly name it.
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