Article

When Do LLMs Say “Some”? An Investigation of Scalar Implicature and Politeness Mitigation in Large Language Models

2026-03-18

Abstract excerpt

<title>Abstract</title> <p> Scalar implicatures link semantic meaning to pragmatic reasoning: although <italic>some</italic> is logically compatible with all, listeners often enrich <italic>some</italic> to “some but not all.” Yet <italic>some</italic> also functions as a politeness hedge that mitigates face-threatening acts, potentially canceling the usual “not all” inference. This study investigates whet...

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Literature Corpus work: f72b1199-8ffc-5414-ae7f-0afdbc32d0bc
DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-8763414/v1

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