Pragmatic priming

Pragmatic priming can be looked at in terms of the alternation of two possible meanings of a sentence: its initial meaning represented by a sentence which has been uttered, or the other potentially intended meaning that has not been uttered (Bott & Chemla, 2013, p. 227). For example, in a sentence like ‘Laura bought some of her shoes from Primark’, the listener can consider ‘Laura bought all of her shoes from

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Primark’ as an alternative. The listener can then choose to negate this alternative by deriving the meaning that: ‘Laura bought some, but not all, of her shoes from

Primark’. This process of selecting and negating an alternative to the sentence that has been uttered is referred to as enrichment by negation of alternatives (Bott & Chemla, 2013, p. 227). For Bott and Chemla (2013), a sentence could have a ‘weak meaning’ if interpreted in its basic form, i.e. without enrichment, while the enrichment of a

sentence gives it a ‘strong meaning’ (Bott & Chemla, 2013, p. 228).

In a picture description paradigm, Bott and Chemla’s (2013) asked the

participants to choose one of two pictures that describes the sentence they are exposed to. The participants were exposed to weak primes and strong primes. The weak primes included two pictures: a picture representing the basic meaning of the sentence where the strong reading is not possible, and a false picture where the weak and the strong reading of the sentence are wrong (See Figure 2.7). For the strong primes, the

participants were shown a weak picture and a strong picture where the two readings of the sentence are possible, i.e. with or without enrichment (Bott & Chemla, 2013, p. 229).

66 Figure 2.7: Weak primes (Bott & Chemla, 2013)

The picture on the left in Figure 2.7 is a false picture because none of the letters are ‘W’. The picture to the right depicts the basic meaning, but not the negated alternative, i.e. ‘Some of the letters are Ws, but some are not’. Bott and Chemla’s (2013) experiment also involved a probe trial where the participants were asked to read an experimental sentence and shown two pictures as in Figure 2.8.

Figure 2.8: Some probe (Bott & Chemla, 2013, p. 229)

For the probe trials, the participants were shown a weak picture and one that says ‘Better picture?’ The participants were asked to choose the ‘Better picture’ option if they felt like the picture on the left does not sufficiently depict the sentence (see Figure 2.8).

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The experiment’s sequence the authors used was a prime trial, followed by another prime trial and then a probe trial. The primes were manipulated to include primes with some, e.g., ‘Some of the letters are As, primes with number, e.g., ‘The picture has three A letters’ and plural primes, e.g., ‘There is As in the picture’. These primes can be enriched using the negation of alternatives as follows: ‘Some, but not all, of the letters are As’, ‘The picture has three, but not four, As’ and ‘There is not an A in the picture, but As’, respectively (Bott & Chemla, 2013).

The type of these primes was also manipulated to allow for all possible prime- probe sequences, i.e. weak ‘some’ prime followed by a ‘number’ probe trial; strong ‘number’ prime followed by a ‘some’ probe trial; weak ‘some’ prime followed by a ‘plural’ probe trial (Bott & Chemla, 2013, p. 229). The results showed more strong interpretations following strong primes relative to weak primes.

In their second experiment, Bott and Chemla (2013) replicated their first experiment except they also included ad hoc expressions as an additional prime type, e.g., ‘There is a C’. The suggested enrichment for such an expression is: ‘There is a C but not a D’. The results from the second experiment confirmed the first experiment findings as more strong interpretations followed strong primes than weak primes. Moreover, the results from the second study suggest between-expressions priming where the enriched some, number and plural expressions can prime each other, but not ad hoc expressions. Enriched ad hoc expressions could not induce enriched

interpretations of the other prime expressions (Bott & Chemla, 2013, p. 230). Finally, Bott and Chemla’s (2013) third experiment replicated their second experiment, except that 20 ad hoc bias trials were added at the start of the experiment. Significant priming was found for all four prime types. Robust priming was found where some and number prime types primed each other. However, no evidence was

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found to suggest that enriched ad hoc expressions could prime enriched some or number expressions. Bott and Chemla (2013, p. 231) attributed the lack of support for between-expressions priming of ad hoc expressions despite the evidence for robust within expression priming for the same prime type was to: “… priming of the search for alternatives, and not priming of the mechanism that negates the alternatives’’.

Priming at the pragmatic level, therefore, stretches the notion of alternatives from a given word or a construction to a group of words or rather a whole sentence. That is, the focus in pragmatic priming is not only on a sentence that a speaker said per se, but also on what the speaker could have said instead.

So far, we have discussed priming at the semantic and pragmatic levels. Section 2.9.3 gives a brief overview of priming research from a socio-linguistic point of view.