Context Dependence and Procedural Meaning: The Semantics of Definites

This thesis argues that there is a theoretically interesting connection between members of the intuitive category of context-dependent expressions, including "we", "tall", "local", "every man", "the woman", "it", "those donkeys" and so on. A treatment of the linguistic meaning of these expressions will be proposed based on the idea that their use raises issues for the audience about the proper understanding of the utterances in which they occur. The proposal will be developed in terms of a semantics for questions, which draws on the idea that to know the meaning of a question is to know what would count as an answer. It can be summarised along similar lines: to know the meaning of a context-dependent expression is to know what properties or relations (of the appropriate type) it could be used to express. The framework in which this idea will be developed can account for why the expressions that are given this issue-based treatment can also be given dependent, bound readings. The class of definite expressions, including descriptions and pronouns, is analysed in detail. A quantificational approach, where the determiner is existential, is assumed for all forms of definiteness. In all cases, the restrictor is interpreted by an atomic definite concept. The audience's grasp of the properties which definite concepts express is the result of inferential processes which take the linguistic meaning of a definite expression as input. These processes are constrained by pragmatic principles. The analysis of context-dependent expressions is extended to account for dependent interpretations. A treatment of donkey sentences that accounts for their variable quantificational force is shown to follow naturally from the analysis. A pragmatic account of infelicitous uses of definites is provided and shown to compare favourably with that provided by dynamic semantic theories. Also, a novel treatment of plural definites is provided which accounts for their variable quantificational force

A corpus-based examination of Scalar Diversity

The phenomenon of scalar diversity refers to the well-replicated finding that different scalar expressions give rise to scalar implicatures at different rates. Previous work has shown that part of the scalar diversity effect can be explained by theoretically motivated factors. Although the effect has been established only in controlled lab-based experiments, there has been a tendency to assume that the marked differences in inference rates that have been observed reflect differences to be found in naturally occurring discourse. We explore whether this is the case by sampling actual language usage involving a wide range of scalar expressions. Adopting the approach in Degen (2015), we investigated the scalar diversity effect in a corpus of Twitter data we constructed. We find that the phenomenon of scalar diversity attenuates significantly when measured in a corpus-based paraphrase task. Although the degree of ‘scalar diversity’ varies, we find that factors derived from theories of scalar implicature can consistently explain nearly two-thirds of the observed variation. As for the remaining variation, we hypothesise that it may be due to a high level of uncertainty about whether adjectival scalar expressions should undergo scalar enrichment

The role of Alternatives in the interpretation of scalars and numbers: Insights Insights from the inference task

Numerical noun phrases (NNPs) are ambiguous between at least two and exactly two interpretations. This ambiguity has been commonly discussed as a case of Scalar Implicature (SI), where meaning is enriched by exclusion of an alternative. But the SI approach to NNPs has also been widely challenged. We tested NNPs and scalar expressions in inference tasks and found that scalars were sensitive to a manipulation that altered the relevance of alternatives, whereas exactly readings for NNPs were not. Our findings provide a theory-critical challenge to the SI view of NNPs and support alternative views

A Lexical Account of Implicit (Bound) Contextual Dependence

No abstract

Adolescents are delayed at inferring complex social intentions in others, but not basic (false) beliefs: An eye movement investigation

Most developmental research on Theory of Mind (ToM) - our ability to infer the beliefs, intentions, and desires of others - has focused on the preschool years. This is unsurprising since it was previously thought that ToM skills are developed between the ages of 2 and 7 years old (Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). Over the last couple of decades however, studies have provided evidence for significant structural and functional changes in the brain areas involved in ToM (the “social brain”) not only during childhood, but also during adolescence. Importantly, some of these findings suggest that the use of ToM shows a prolonged development through middle childhood and adolescence. Although evidence from previous studies suggests a protracted development of ToM, the factors that constrain performance during middle childhood and adolescence are only just beginning to be explored. In the current paper we report two visual world eye-tracking studies that focus on the timecourse of predictive inferences. We establish that when the complexity of ToM inferences are at a level which is comparable to standard change-of-location False-belief tasks, then adolescents and adults generate predictions for other agents’ behaviour in the same timecourse. However, when inferences are socially more complex, requiring inferences about higher-order mental states, adolescents generate predictive gaze bias at a marked delay relative to adults. Importantly, our results demonstrate that these developmental differences go beyond differences in executive functions (inhibitory control or working memory), and point to distinct expectations between groups and greater uncertainty when predicting actions based on conflicting desires

Scalar Inferencing, Polarity and Cognitive Load

According to the Polarity Hypothesis, the presence or absence of a processing cost for Scalar Inferences (SIs) depends on their polarity. This hypothesis predicts, among other things, that the processing of lower-bounding SIs should not be affected by cognitive load the same way upper-bounding SIs are. To date, evidence in support of this prediction comes from the comparison between upper-bounding and lower-bounding SIs elicited by disparate scalar words. In this paper, we report on two dual-task experiments testing this prediction in a more controlled way by comparing upper-bounding and lower-bounding SIs arising from the same scalar words or scale-mates operating over the same dimension. Results show that, for these more minimal comparisons, lower-bounding SIs involve comparable cognitive demands as their upper-bounding counterparts. These findings challenge the idea that load effects are consistently modulated by SI polarity and suggest instead that these effects are relatively consistent across different types of SIs. </p

How can large language models become more human?

Psycholinguistic experiments reveal that efficiency of human language use is founded on predictions at both syntactic and lexical levels. Previous models of human prediction exploiting LLMs have used an information theoretic measure called surprisal, with success on naturalistic text in a wide variety of languages, but under-performance on challenging text such as garden path sentences. This paper introduces a novel framework that combines the lexical predictions of an LLM with the syntactic structures provided by a dependency parser. The framework gives rise to an Incompatibility Fraction. When tested on two garden path datasets, it correlated well with human reading times, distinguished between easy and hard garden path, and outperformed surprisal