{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,5,19]],"date-time":"2026-05-19T13:44:23Z","timestamp":1779198263968,"version":"3.51.4"},"reference-count":67,"publisher":"MIT Press","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2023,7,26]],"date-time":"2023-07-26T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1690329600000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":206,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":["direct.mit.edu"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":[],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2023,7,25]]},"abstract":"<jats:title>Abstract<\/jats:title><jats:p>Scalar inferences (SI) are a signature example of how humans interpret language based on unspoken alternatives. While empirical studies have demonstrated that human SI rates are highly variable\u2014both within instances of a single scale, and across different scales\u2014there have been few proposals that quantitatively explain both cross- and within-scale variation. Furthermore, while it is generally assumed that SIs arise through reasoning about unspoken alternatives, it remains debated whether humans reason about alternatives as linguistic forms, or at the level of concepts. Here, we test a shared mechanism explaining SI rates within and across scales: context-driven expectations about the unspoken alternatives. Using neural language models to approximate human predictive distributions, we find that SI rates are captured by the expectedness of the strong scalemate as an alternative. Crucially, however, expectedness robustly predicts cross-scale variation only under a meaning-based view of alternatives. Our results suggest that pragmatic inferences arise from context-driven expectations over alternatives, and these expectations operate at the level of concepts.1<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1162\/tacl_a_00579","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2023,7,26]],"date-time":"2023-07-26T19:14:56Z","timestamp":1690398896000},"page":"885-901","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1162\/mitpressjournals.corrections.policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":10,"title":["Expectations over Unspoken Alternatives Predict Pragmatic Inferences"],"prefix":"10.1162","volume":"11","author":[{"given":"Jennifer","family":"Hu","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. jennhu@mit.edu"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Roger","family":"Levy","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. rplevy@mit.edu"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Judith","family":"Degen","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, USA. jdegen@stanford.edu"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Sebastian","family":"Schuster","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Language Science and Technology, Saarland University, Germany. seschust@lst.uni-saarland.de"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"281","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2023,7,25]]},"reference":[{"key":"2023072619144463300_bib1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1892","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/2022.emnlp-main.124","article-title":"Stop measuring calibration when humans disagree","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing","author":"Baan","year":"2022"},{"key":"2023072619144463300_bib2","article-title":"Is \u2018good\u2019 better than \u2018excellent\u2019? 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