a range of situations that can be ranked from weakest to strongest -- that is, least informative to most informative, on some relevant scale for the meaning of a sentence. Example: He won't eat shrimp, let alone squid makes sense by invoking a scalar model of things that you would not expect someone to be willing to eat, such that being unwilling to eat shrimp is at the strong, more informative, end of the scalar model, and being unwilling to eat squid is at the weak, less informative end of the scalar model (in a culture where eating squid is considered more repulsive than eating shrimp). (Section 17.3.3)