Moving Beyond Truth Conditions: The Computation of Meaning
May 8-9, Benjamin Banneker Room, Stamp Student Union, University of Maryland: College Park

Speakers

Abstracts

(More abstracts will follow shortly.)

Dan Grodner

Some Reasons to Doubt that ‘Some’ (and Probably All) Scalar Inferences are Delayed

Many investigators believe that scalar inferences (SIs) are late arriving. Two types of evidence provide direct support for this view: slower verification times for sentences when an SI is computed (e.g., Bott & Noveck 2004) and faster eye-movement convergence on a target in response to the literal meaning of non-scalar quantifiers than to the SI of scalar quantifiers (Huang & Snedeker 2009). This paper argues that neither result is a consequence of pragmatic enrichment per se.

Two lines of experimental evidence are presented. The first examines verification times for sentences containing scalar items. As in previous work, participants were slower to verify sentences when they computed the upper-bounded reading associated with an SI. However, this result remained even when the upper-bounded meaning was conveyed literally. This suggests that the delay derives from the verification process rather than computing the SI.

The second line of research adapted the visual-world methodology of Huang and Snedeker. In a typical trial, participants were directed to “Click on the girl who has some/all/none of the balls/balloons/items” for displays containing a girl with two of four balls, a girl with four of four balloons, and a girl with no items. Replicating Huang and Snedeker, target identification was immediate for the nonscalar quantifier “all.” However, it was also immediate for scalar “some” and non-scalar “none.” Target identification occurred before the noun's point of disambiguation for each condition. I will argue that several factors likely contribute to the delay observed in earlier work. Understanding the nature of these factors sheds light on when and how SIs are computed.

Together, this work indicates (1) that implicated meaning do not systematically lag behind literal content, and (2) comparisons of literal and pragmatic interpretations need to take into account the nature of task demands in order to establish precise time-course questions.

Matthew Husband

The Computation of Telicity

When it comes to the representation of events, several subtle factors have been shown to influence their temporal properties and interpretations, including not only tense and grammatical aspect, but also the internal constitution of the event itself, whether it has a duration and whether it has a natural endpoint.

Focusing on the natural endpoint, or telicity, of an event, important research has established that both the verb's semantics and particular properties of its arguments are used to determine whether the event is telic or atelic. In particular, the verb and its internal argument appear to share a privileged role in compositionally determining telicity. Given these observations, studies on the processing of events can inform theories concerned with how sentence interpretation proceeds online. I review the literature and present several studies examining three questions on how verb and argument information is recognized and used by the parser to construct an event interpretation.

  1. What is the domain over which the parser interprets telicity?
  2. What factors guide the parser in telicity interpretations online?
  3. Does the parser immediately commit to a telicity interpretation?

Answers to these questions help to establish the principles used by the parser to assign event interpretations to sentences and to make interpretative commitments more generally while furthering our understanding of the relationship between the grammar and the parser and how the grammar guides interpretative decisions online.

Jeff Lidz & Paul Pietroski

The Verificational Thickness of Meaning: Number, Semantics and Psychology

By looking at the relationship between language understanding and verification procedures, we argue that a sentence’s meaning is strictly richer than a truth condition — something which makes reference to the algorithms and cognitive representations that are used to determine the truth value of the sentence in a particular world. Using the word most as a probe into the interface between theories of linguistic meaning and the mental representation of number, we show how it is profitable to capitalize on verification as a probe into semantic representation. Our arguments depend on two kinds of evidence: (a) behavioral evidence based on adults’ ability to verify sentences in tightly controlled contexts, (b) children’s understanding of sentences containing most. In both cases, we capitalize on detailed models of the cognitive representation of number and the capacity of the visual system to rapidly extract information from a scene in order to show (i) that the meaning of most is not expressed in terms of correspondence, (ii) that the meaning of most does depend on comparison of cardinalities/magnitudes, (iii) that there is a subtraction operator in the mental representation of most (iv) that acquisition of most proceeds independent of the acquisition of cardinality and (v) that early representations of most may be in terms of magnitudes and not cardinalities.

Julien Musolino

The linguistic representation of number: integrating formal and developmental perspectives

Given the pivotal role that numbers play in our lives, understanding how we acquire numerical concepts and how we learn to express these concepts through the medium of language represents an important goal for Cognitive Science. In this talk, I will present results from a research program designed to integrate two independent lines of research on numerically quantified expressions (two dogs, three cats). One stems from work in linguistic theory and asks what truth conditional contributions such expressions make to the utterances in which they are used. The other comes from the study of language development and asks when and how children learn the meaning of such expressions. This new work demonstrates that it is desirable — both theoretically and empirically — to investigate questions pertaining to the number vocabulary from a perspective which combines formal and developmental approaches.

Ira Noveck

Pragmatic Enrichment

Developmental and adult sentence-processing studies have played an important role in helping make the distinction between semantic and pragmatic contributions to meaning. This has been most obvious with scalar terms. While the linguistically-encoded meaning of the existential quantifier Some is indeed compatible with All, the Not All interpretation arises due to interpretative efforts. Experimentally speaking, children as old as ten have been shown to accept the minimal lexical meanings of terms like Some (which can be glossed as at least one), while adults tend to be more likely to go further by engaging a pragmatic inference (e.g. to make Some imply Not All). For example, Noveck (2001) showed that 8- and 10-year-olds are significantly more likely than adults to respond affirmatively to statements such as Some elephants have trunks because adults are more likely to generate Not all elephants have trunks (which justifies a false response). (see also Papafragou & Musolino, 2003; Chierchia, Crain, Guasti, Gualmini, & Meroni, 2001; Guasti et al., 2005; Pouscoulous et al., 2007). In this talk, I will summarize findings such as these and show what Experimental Pragmatics can reveal more generally.

Anna Papafragou

Space in Language and Thought

The linguistic expression of space draws from and is constrained by basic, probably universal, elements of perceptual/cognitive structure. Nevertheless, there are considerable cross-linguistic differences in how these fundamental space concepts are segmented and packaged into sentences. This cross-linguistic variation has led to the question whether the language one speaks could affect the way one thinks about space - hence whether speakers of different languages differ in the way they see the world. This talk addresses this question through a series of cross-linguistic experiments comparing the linguistic and non-linguistic representation of motion and space in both adults and children. Taken together, the experiments reveal remarkable similarities in the way space is perceived, remembered and categorized despite differences in how spatial scenes are encoded cross-linguistically.

Liina Pylkkänen

The Anterior Midline Field: Progress Report

Within the cognitive neuroscience of language, investigation of sentence level semantics has probably been the most disconnected from Linguistics. Consequently, there has not been a body of research focussed on uncovering the neural bases of basic semantic composition, as this operation is defined by Linguistics. In this talk I describe a research program that aims to do this. Our findings consistently point to a specific MEG component, the Anterior Midline Field, as sensitive to stimulus variables that should affect semantic composition. I will discuss our current understanding of the functional role of this component.

Daniel Rothschild

Explaining Presupposition Projection

Understanding the pattern by which complex sentences inherit the presuppositions of their parts, presupposition projection, has been a major topic in formal pragmatics since the 1970s. Heim's landmark paper “On the Projection Problem for Presuppositions ” (1983) proposed a replacement of truth-conditional semantics with a dynamic semantics that treats meanings as instructions to update the common ground. Heim's system predicts the basic pattern of presupposition projection quite accurately. The classic objection to this program (including other versions of dynamic semantics) is that the treatment of binary connectives is stipulative, and other, equally natural treatments fail to make the right predictions about presupposition projection. I consider an alternative version of dynamic semantics, modeled on the earlier work of Stalnaker, Karttunen and Soames, designed to escape this objection.

Philippe Schlenker

From Implicatures to Presuppositions: New Debates on the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface

Recent debates about scalar implicatures have been characterized by two developments. First, the division of labor between pragmatics and grammar has been revisited: neo-Gricean accounts placed scalar implicatures on the pragmatic side of the divide, but recent analyses (Chierchia, Fox, Spector) have made a grammatical approach plausible. Second, theoretical questions have been illuminated by new experimental evidence about adult judgments, reaction times, and acquisition. I will suggest that similar developments are taking place in the analysis of presuppositions. First, even though they were treated by ‘dynamic semantics’ as a grammatical phenomenon, several new theories have made a pragmatic treatment plausible again - and the debate is currently more open than ever. Second, experimental evidence is proving increasing crucial to settle this new debate; part of the data are already available, but much work remains to be done.