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The logic in language: How all quantifiers are alike, but each quantifier is different| old_uid | 10357 |
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| title | The logic in language: How all quantifiers are alike, but each quantifier is different |
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| start_date | 2015/12/03 |
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| schedule | 10h-11h30 |
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| online | no |
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| summary | Quantifier words like each, every, all and three specify what relationships hold between the sets of entities, events and properties denoted by other words. When two quantifiers are in the same clause, they create a systematic ambiguity. “Every kid climbed a tree” could mean that there was only one tree, climbed by all, or as many different trees as there are climbing kids. Recent work in psycholinguistics (Raffray and Pickering, 2010) has shown that Logical Form representations can be primed -- that how people resolve one scope ambiguity will affect their resolution of another ambiguity with different noun content. This suggests that once constructed, mental representations of the relationships between quantifiers are abstracted from the specific sentence and can be reused.
We extend R&P's paradigm to look for deep representational similarities and differences across different quantifiers. Priming aside, we find very large differences in the overall biases of these quantifiers to take wide or narrow scope relative to a -- large enough to swamp many other factors that have been argued to drive scope ambiguity resolution (e.g. linear order, c-command, thematic hierarchy). Looking at the priming effects, we find systematic priming of participants' preferred reading within-quantifier, but not between-quantifier. We find that changing the verb between the prime and target sentence does not reduce the priming effect, suggesting the effect is not based on the overall similarity between the two sentences. We go on to discover one case where there is priming across quantifiers – when one number (e.g. three) is in the prime, and a different one (e.g. four) is in the target. We discuss how these findings relate to linguistic theories of quantifier meaning and scope ambiguity resolution, and to the division of labor between conceptual content and combinatorial semantics. |
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| responsibles | Strickland |
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