The Role of Partitive Construction in Generating Scalar Implicatures

The paper is concerned with the facilitating effect of the partitive construction for the availability of scalar implicatures in the interpretation of utterances with the quantifier neki ("some") in Serbian, one of only a few languages in which even adult speakers show a relatively low rate of deriving scalar implicatures. The experimentally based research emphasizes the role of language-specific factors for the derivation of scalar implicatures, showing that the proportion of derived scalar implicatures depends on certain syntactic and semantic parameters. However, as the highest rates of scalar implicatures derived only go as high as 68%, our research argues in favor of the default status of the logical semantic component of scalar items, with the pragmatic effects being dependent on the pragmatic factors in the discourse.