Upper-Bounded Scalars and Argumentation-in-Language Theory

Scalar implicatures, such as the ‘not all’-implicature attached to “some”, have been at the center of debates on the semantics-pragmatics interface ever since Horn (1972). The question is whether ‘not all’ is part of the semantics of “some” or rather pragmatically inferred in context. The latter theory, inspired by Grice’s (1975, 1989) work, is by far the more popular one. It analyzes scalars such as “some” as semantically lower-bounded, i.e. as meaning ‘at least some’. I will defend the view that “some” is both lower- and upper-bounded, i.e. on which “some” means ‘some, not all’. In order to do so, I will first propose a distinction between ‘upper bound’ and ‘scalar implicature’, following Ariel (2003, 2004, 2006, 2015). I will thereby defend the idea that scalars such as “some” are semantically upper-bounded, but not that scalar implicatures are semantic. Second, I will give an overview of the most cited arguments against ‘not all’-semantics for “some”: the entailment from “All…” to “Some…”, the non-redundancy of the expression “some, but not all”, the cancelability of scalar implicatures, and the non-paraphrasability of “some” as “some, but not all”. In the discussion of the non-redundancy argument, I will use Anscombre and Ducrot’s (1983) theory of ‘argumentation in language’, which has been largely ignored by pragmaticists working on scalar implicatures. This theory will also permit me to reanalyze some problematic examples presented by Ariel (2015) that have led her to conclude that scalar implicatures with “some” and “most” are rare.