Linguistic and Social Meaning Match: An experiment on modal concord in English

Modal concord (MC) refers to the phenomenon where two modal elements of the same flavor and force in a sentence yield an interpretation of single modality (SM). In this paper, we report on an experimental study on MC in English, addressing their linguistic and social meaning. Our results show a strengthening effect by necessity MC and a weakening effect of possibility MC in that significantly higher speaker commitment ratings were received for necessity MC vs. SM constructions (i.e., must certainly vs. must) with the reverse pattern for possibility modal constructions (i.e., may possibly vs. may). Furthermore, MC and SM were shown to differ in social meanings, suggesting a correlation between the meaning strength of a linguistic expression and the social perception of the speaker

Investigating fragment usage with a gamified utterance selection task

Nonsentential utterances, or fragments, like A coffee, please! can often be used to communicate a propositional meaning otherwise encoded by a complete sentence I\u27d like to order a coffee, please!). Previous research focused mostly on the syntax and licensing of fragments, but the questions of why speakers use fragments and how listeners interpret them are still underexplored. I propose a simple game-theoretic account of fragment usage, which predicts that (i) listeners assign fragments the most likely interpretation in context and (ii) that speakers are aware of this and trade-off production cost and the risk of being misunderstood when choosing their utterance. Using a corpus of production data, empirically founded and precise model predictions are generated. These predictions are evaluated with two experiments using a novel gamified utterance selection paradigm. The experiments suggest that, as predicted, speakers take into account both potential gain in efficiency and the risk of being misunderstood when choosing their utterance

Studying the interplay of context and semantic content in the interpretation of adversative conjunctions with eye-tracking

The French adversative connective mais, much like its English counterpart but, takes two conjuncts and indicates that they stand in some kind of opposition. The nature of this opposition is often discussed in the existing literature of adversatives. Using an eyetracking experiment, we look at where and when this opposition appears to be manifested in a sentence reading task, using superiority comparatives sentences that appear degraded without a supportive context, as well as inferiority comparatives that do not seem to require such specific contextual information. We presented participants (n = 28) with four types of sentences, differing in the form of comparative, and in the information provided by the context. Some contexts contained a pivot property to help readers access the opposition of the two conjuncts, while others were neutral in that regard. Eye movements were recorded with a 250Hz Tobii Pro Fusion eyetracker, and mixed effect models were used to analyze the following eyetracking metrics : total fixation time and regression probability for the whole sentences, as well as first-fixation duration, first-gaze duration, regression-path duration, regressions-out and regressions-in for each individual words. Even if the helping context is shown to lower negative acceptability judgment on sentences with mais plus (Winterstein et al. 2014), we found no context effect in online reading processing, finding instead a persisting effect of the less/more dichotomy in all chosen measures, sometimes before fixation of those words, pointing towards a parafoveal effect of the aforementioned dichotomy, which merits closer look in future work

Tiered honorification in Eastern Indo-Aryan: A [HON]-less proposal

Longstanding tradition in the literature uses a [HON] feature to analyze tiered honorification systems of Indo-Aryan. This work presents a stark opposition to that tradition, using Wang’s (2023) framework based on a pragmatic calculus, which crucially does not make use of  [HON].  I adapt such a framework to show how it can explain both the diachronic and synchronic properties  of tiered systems

Non-de dicto construals as a unified phenomenon

The interpretation of expressions in the scope of intensional operators μ is not always relativized to the quantificational domain of μ. The literature has identified several such phenomena, subsumed here under ‘non-de dicto (NDD)’- construals. Based on novel data, we argue contra most existing accounts that (i) different kinds of NDD-construals (der re and transparent construals of predicates) must be derived by the same mechanism, (ii) this mechanism should involve replace- ment of meanings of the sub-constituents of the clause embedded by the intensional operator, (iii) replacement is constrained in that different replacements cannot lead to different answers to the QUD, and (iv) NDD-construals are not grammatically individuated, i.e., they do not ‘live off’ a structure distinct from the one that yields us meanings without NDD. We then sketch a proposal that captures these properties

A conceptual analysis of verbs of pushing and pulling

Although verbal expressions of caused motion, such as push and pull, have been extensively studied within linguistics, semantic dimensions beyond path and manner of motion have received less attention. This pilot study aims to identify such dimensions involved in the expression of caused motion in German, focusing on observable properties of pushing and pulling events that determine the selection of verbs to describe events of caused motion. Using 3D graphical modeling, participants were presented with video clips of a computer-animated agent moving a barrel, thereby allowing for a systematic manipulation of properties and hence dimensions. We investigated four dimensions to assess their impact on verb selection: (i) angle of contact, (ii) movement of the agent relative to the barrel, (iii) the agent’s orientation/facing, and (iv) the force employed. Cluster and principal component analyses were conducted on the collected linguistic data. Verbs were represented by five-dimensional vectors capturing correlations with the cosine and sine of the angle, and marginal probabilities in conditions of instantaneous movement, forward facing, and heavy force. Our findings indicate that conceptually distinguishable verb clusters are primarily defined by the movement feature – that is, whether the agent moves together with the barrel or not – and the cosine of the angle. Contrary to theoretical predictions, little evidence was found supporting the categorization of verbs based on the force applied to the barrel. These results suggest that the movement and position of the agent relative to the moved object are key determinants in the production of verbal descriptions of caused motion events

Cross-linguistics difference in disjunction in two-dimensional semantics

Disjunction, expressed by or in English, is a primary connective available in natural language. It was traditionally analyzed as the counterparts of the Boolean connectives ∨ (e.g., Montague 1973), but subsequent studies revealed a number of inadequacies in this approach, which led to the ‘dynamic turn’ in natural language semantics (Karttunen 1974; Heim 1982; et seq). However, the empirical base of the literature almost exclusively comprises examples of English. The cross-linguistic (in)adequacy of the theory has yet to be investigated. This paper addresses this research gap by inspecting disjunction in Japanese. More specifically, this paper examines the (non-)replicability of the observations that support the dynamic analysis for English ‘φ or ψ’ that hardwires the local context ¬φ. I argue that Japanese disjunction exhibits some kinds of evidence for the local context, but not others

Does ‘a couple’ pattern with scalars or numbers - Insights from inference and ‘so’ tasks

Previous research establishes that paucal quantifiers like ‘a couple’ are ambiguous between the literal meaning of ‘at least two’ and the enriched meaning understood as conveying a restriction on quantity, the latter of which can be explained by a pragmatic phenomenon, i.e. scalar inference (SI). To address whether this ambiguity patterns with that of scalars or numbers, our Experiment 1 explored the behaviours of ‘a couple’ and scalars with two types of probe questions in inference tasks, and Experiment 2 continued this theme by testing the naturalness rating for ‘a couple’ and scalars in an ‘X so not Y’ construction. The results of our experiments indicate two natures of ‘a couple’: a non-monotonic /cardinal (approximately two) and proportional (a small proportion of)

New experimental evidence against the similarity approach to conditionals

The similarity approach to conditionals (Stalnaker 1968; Lewis 1973) predicts Reciprocity to be valid: whenever A > B, B > A and A > C are true, B > C is true too (where A > B denotes if A would B). We ran an experiment to test the validity of this rule. Strikingly, half of our participants judged the rule invalid, i.e. judged in at least one scenario that it does not preserve truth. Our data also challenge Kratzer’s (2012) and Fine’s (2012) semantics of conditionals, but we show that McHugh’s (2022; 2023) aboutness approach can account for our data

Asking (non-)canonical questions

Questions are classically taken to be requests for information, while acknowledging a wide variety of ‘non-canonical’ questions that do not have this function (e.g. rhetorical questions, exam questions, etc). A standard current approach is to take the request-for-information view as an analytical starting point and then weaken it for the counterexamples. This paper proposes an alternative view of questioning that encompasses many of these counterexamples directly: to ask a question is to open coordination on the public resolution of an issue. This coordination-centric view, I argue, accounts for much of the landscape of both canonical and non-canonical questions, while generalizing much previous work related to Questions Under Discussion in discourse