defaultist

Of or relating to defaultism.

Adjective

  1. Of or relating to defaultism.

Origin

From default + -ist.

Noun

  1. One who believes that scalar implicatures arise from a default association with a word, rather than arising from contextual inference.
    • A defaultist believes that the default interpretation of the phrase "some eels are fish" is the pragmatic interpretation "some, but not all, eels are fish".
    • Hence, there can be little doubt that Levinson is a strong defaultist. - 2010, Bart Geurts, Quantity Implicatures, page 87:
    • For Experiment 8, the defaultists could make a similar argument about the absence of an SI-cancellation effect that I made about the absence of an SI-calculation effect. - 2010, Arjen Zondervan, Scalar Implicatures Or...

    Antonyms: contextualist

Forms

defaultists