Flexible Expectations of Speaker Informativeness Shape Pragmatic Inference

Human communication relies on shared expectations between speakers and hearers. For example, upon hearing a sentence like “Some of my dogs bark,” the listener typically assumes that the speaker did not intend the literal semantic meaning (“At least one (and possibly all) of my dogs bark”). Instead, s/he is likely to derive a scalar implicature (SI), inferring that the speaker intended to convey “Not all of my dogs bark.” Properties of the speaker are known to affect whether listeners compute SIs, with comprehenders being less likely to make a pragmatic inference when the speaker is not knowledgeable of the situation at hand. What is unclear is whether listeners also use previously-held expectations about speaker groups (e.g., children, non-native speakers) to override Gricean principles, in such a way that is stable across situational contexts and does not require an adaptation period. Across two experiments, we investigated how listeners interpret under-informative utterances produced by native and non-native speakers. We found that a subset of individuals is more tolerant to pragmatic infelicities produced by non-native speakers (Exp. 2), but that this tolerance is subject to individual differences in language processing ability and does not emerge in a speeded task where the utterances are supported by visual context (Exp. 1)

The acquisition of evidentiality in Turkish

This paper is concerned with the acquisition of the semantics and pragmatics of evidential markers in Turkish. Evidential markers encode the speaker’s source for the information being reported in the utterance. Turkish grammaticalizes evidentiality in two different past tense markers: -DI (past of direct experience) and –mIş (past of indirect experience). In this article, we report findings from three studies conducted with Turkish learners between the ages of 5 and 7 that test the acquisition of both the semantics of evidentiality (Exp.1-2) and the pragmatic effects associated with evidential markers (Exp.3). Our results show that Turkish-speaking children between the ages of 5 and 7 produce morphemes for past events appropriately but are only beginning to discover the evidential dimensions of these morphemes. Furthermore, of the two evidential morphemes, -DI which encodes direct evidence is understood before –mIş which encodes indirect evidence. We discuss implications of these results for the learning challenges posed by evidentiality

Intentionality Effects on Event Boundaries

Theories of event cognition have hypothesized that the boundaries of events are characterized by change, including a change in the agent’s goal, but the role of higher-order goal information on the placement of event boundaries has not been addressed experimentally. We tested whether goals can affect how viewers determine event boundaries. Participants read a context sentence stating an agent’s goal (e.g., “Jesse wants to eat the orange with her breakfast” vs. “Jesse wants to use the orange as a garnish”). Participants then saw an image of an event outcome (e.g., a partly peeled orange) and were asked to identify whether the event had occurred (“Did she peel the orange?”). Participants were more likely to respond Yes to a partly complete outcome if the outcome satisfied the agent’s goal. Our results offer the first direct evidence in support of the conclusion that higher-order intentionality information affects the way events are conceptualized

Encoding transfer of possession events

The present study focuses on the linguistic and non-linguistic encoding of giving and taking events. For both English and Mandarin Chinese speakers, we find that the linguistic encoding of these transfer events respects the Thematic Hierarchy and the Source-Goal asymmetry (Exp.1 and 2): Agents are mentioned more often than Patient; Goals are encoded more often than Sources. However, in non-linguistic representation, the bias against Sources is not observed (Exp.3 and 4): Giver, Givee, Taker and Takee are equally prominent in memory. Taken together, our results support linguistic theories extending Source/Goal paths to Transfer of Possession events and call for a finer-grained account of homology between linguistic and non-linguistic encoding of events

Are Cross-Linguistically Frequent Semantic Systems Easier to Learn? The Case of Evidentiality

It is often assumed that cross-linguistically more prevalent distinctions are easier to learn (Typological Prevalence Hypothesis - TPH). Prior work supports this hypothesis in phonology, morphology and syntax but has not addressed semantics. Using an Artificial Language Learning paradigm, we explore the learnability of semantic distinctions within the domain of evidentiality (i.e. the linguistic encoding of information sources). Our results support the TPH, since the most prevalent evidential system was learned best while the most rare evidentiality system yielded the worst learnability results. Furthermore, our results indicate that, cross- linguistically, indirect information sources seem to be marked preferentially (and acquired more easily) compared to direct sources. We explain this pattern in terms of the pragmatic need to mark indirect, potentially more unreliable sources over direct sources of information

Shake, rattle, \u27n\u27 roll: The representation of motion in language and cognition

Languages vary strikingly in how they encode motion events. In some languages (e.g. English), manner of motion is typically encoded within the verb, while direction of motion information appears in modifiers. In other languages (e.g. Greek), the verb usually encodes the direction of motion, while the manner information is encoded in modifiers. We designed two studies to investigate whether these language-specific patterns affect speakers’ reasoning about motion. We compared the performance of English and Greek children and adults (a) in non-linguistic (memory and categorization) tasks involving motion events, and (b) in their linguistic descriptions of these same motion events. Even though the two linguistic groups differed significantly in terms of their linguistic preferences, their performance in the non-linguistic tasks was identical. More surprisingly, the linguistic descriptions given by subjects within language also failed to correlate consistently with their memory and categorization performance in the relevant regards. For the domain studied, these results are consistent with the view that conceptual development and organization are largely independent of language-specific labeling practices. The discussion emphasizes that the necessarily sketchy nature of speech assures that it will be at best a crude index of thought

Scalar Implicatures: Experiments at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface

In this article we present two sets of experiments designed to investigate the acquisition of scalar implicatures. Scalar implicatures arise in examples like Some professors are famous where the speaker’s use of some typically indicates that s/he had reasons not to use a more informative term, e.g. all. Some professors are famous therefore gives rise to the implicature that not all professors are famous. Recent studies on the development of pragmatics suggest that preschool children are often insensitive to such implicatures when they interpret scalar terms (Noveck 2001 for terms like might and some; Chierchia, Crain, Guasti, Gualmini and Meroni 2001 for or). This conclusion raises two important questions: a) are all scalar terms treated in the same way by young children?, and b) does the child’s difficulty reflect a genuine inability to derive scalar implicatures or is it due to demands imposed by the experimental task on an otherwise pragmatically savvy child? Experiment 1 addresses the first question by testing a group of 30 5-year-olds and 30 adults (all native speakers of Greek) on three different scales, meriki/oli (some/all), dio/tris (two/three) and arxizo/teliono (start/finish). In each case, subjects were presented with contexts which satisfy the truth conditions of the stronger (i.e. more informative) terms on each scale (i.e. all, three and finish) but were described using the weaker terms of the scales (i.e. some, two, start). We found that while adults overwhelmingly rejected these infelicitous descriptions, children almost never did so. Children also differed from adults in that their rejection rate on the numerical scale was reliably higher than on the two other scales. In order to address question (b), we trained a group of 30 5-year-olds to detect infelicitous statements. We then presented them with modified versions of the stories of Experiment 1, which now more readily invited scalar inferences. These manipulations gave rise to significantly higher rejection rates than those observed in Experiment 1. Overall, these findings indicate that children do not treat all scalar terms alike and, more importantly, that children’s ability to derive scalar implicatures is affected by their awareness of the goal of the task. Developmental and methodological implications as well as theoretical implications for the semantics of numeral terms are discussed

Must . . . stay . . . strong!

This is the fourth installment in our trilogy of papers on epistemic modality.It is a recurring matra that epistemic must creates a statement that is weaker than the corresponding flat-footed assertion: It must be raining vs. It’s raining. Contrary to classic discussions of the phenomenon such as by Karttunen, Kratzer, and Veltman, we argue that instead of having a weak semantics, must presupposes the presence of an indirect inference or deduction rather than of a direct observation. This is independent of the strength of the claim being made. Epistemic must is therefore quite similar to evidential markers of indirect evidence known from languages with rich evidential systems. We work towards a formalization of the evidential component, relying on a structured model of information states (analogous to some models used in the belief dynamics literature). We explain why in many contexts, one can perceive a lack of confidence on the part of the speaker who uses must