The logic of pragmatics. An experimental investigation with children and adults

In the first part of my dissertation I present some experimental works that investigate how adults interpret scalar items such as or in different syntactic contexts, such as (1) and (2), and ambiguous sentences like (3), in which the pronoun "it" admits of two interpretations, due to the presence of an indefinite antecedent: (1) If an A has a B or a C, then she also has a D (2) If an A has a D, then she also has a B or a C (3) If a farmer owns a donkey, he beats it In interpreting these sentences, adults display a high degree of “spontaneous logicality”, showing sensitivity to logic properties (such as entailment patterns and monotonicity properties) of the elements in the sentence. The second part is focused on the investigation of “pragmatic” inferences in children, aiming at attesting which factors may influence children’s computation of Scalar Implicatures (like the ones arising in (2)) and eventually contribute to their failure or their improvement in this task