Building on Geurts (2019) programmatic proposal, this paper develops a commitment-based model of Scalar Implicatures (SIs) that shifts the explanatory focus from speaker intentions and mental states to the dynamics between private commitments and their social expression. The model accounts for both standard scalar inferences and cases in which speakers’ private stances remain partially opaque, offering a socially grounded alternative to intention-based accounts, with broad implications for the analysis of SIs across speech acts and the explanation of cross-cultural variation.
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Paul Marty (2026) studied this question.
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