Shared mechanism underlying unembedded and embedded enrichments: evidence from enrichment priming

Abstract

In this paper, we use a priming paradigm to explore the mechanisms underlying
unembedded and embedded scalar enrichments. In particular, the aim is to see if local
pragmatic enrichment could be a shared mechanism, involved in both. The two experiments
presented adopt Bott & Chemla's (2016) enrichment priming paradigm and test whether
unembedded and embedded enrichments could prime each other. The goal is to investigate
whether local pragmatic enrichment is indeed being accessed for the interpretation of the
unembedded scalar and whether local enrichments, like other lexical semantic phenomena,
are susceptible to priming.
Keywords: pragmatics, scalar enrichments, priming.