Positive and negative polar questions in discourse

This paper presents a number of experiments assessing the felicity of positive and negative polar questions in various types of discourse contexts

Adjectival vs. Nominal Categorization Processes: The Rule vs. Similarity hypothesis

Classification of entities into categories can be determined based on a rule - a single criterion or relatively few criteria combined with logical operations like „and‟ or „or‟. Alternatively, classification can be based on similarity to prototypical examples, i.e. an overall degree of match to prototypical values on multiple dimensions. Two cognitive systems are reported in the literature to underlie processing by rules vs. similarity. This paper presents a novel thesis according to which adjectives and nouns trigger processing by the rule vs. similarity systems, respectively. The paper defends the thesis that nouns are conceptually gradable and multidimensional, but, unlike adjectives, their dimensions are integrated through similarity operations, like weighted sums, to yield an overall degree of match to ideal values on multiple dimensions. By contrast, adjectives are associated with single dimensions, or several dimensions bound by logical operations, such as „and‟ and „or‟. In accordance, nouns are predicted to differ from adjectives semantically, developmentally, and processing-wise. Similarity-based dimension integration is implicit - processing is automatic, fast, and beyond speaker awareness - whereas logical, rule-based dimension integration is explicit, and is acquired late. The paper highlights a number of links between findings reported in the literature about rule- vs. similarity-based categorization and corresponding structural, distributional, neural and developmental findings about adjectives and nouns. These links suggest that the rule vs. similarity (RS) hypothesis for the adjective-noun distinction should be studied more directly in the future

Restricted quantification over tastes

This paper provides an analysis of statements with predicates of personal taste (tasty, fun, etc.) Rather than directly relativizing semantic interpretation to a judge (cf., Lasershon, 2005), this paper aims to capture the phenomenon called „faultless disagreement" (the fact that one can deny a speaker's subjective utterance without challenging the speaker’s opinion) by means of pragmatic restrictions on quantification domains. Using vagueness models, a statement like the cake is tasty is analyzed as true in a partial context c iff it is true in the set of completions t consistent with c (Kamp, 1975), wherein tasty denotes different, contextually possible, taste measures (Kennedy, 1999). Phrases like for me restrict the set of completions to those with taste measures consistent with the speaker’s taste. Faultless disagreement naturally follows assuming speakers accommodate or reject implicit restrictions of this sort (Lewis, 1979)