Recent uclaling items

Finding the force: a novel word learning experiment with modals

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This study investigates the semantic and pragmatic challenges of acquiring the force of English modals, which express possibility (e.g., might) and necessity (e.g., must). Children seem to struggle with modal force through at least age 4, over-accepting both possibility modals where adults would prefer necessity modals, and necessity modals in possibility situations. These difficulties are typically blamed on pragmatic or conceptual immaturity. In this study, we sidestep these immaturity issues by investigating the challenges of modal learning through a novel word learning experiment with adults, for different 'flavors' of modals: epistemic (knowledge-based) versus teleological (goal-based), and comparing novel modals with actual English modals. We find that when learning possibility modals, adult learners behave as expected: they accept novel modals in necessity situations, both in epistemic and teleological contexts, but less often after they've learned a pragmatically more...

De re interpretation in belief reports: An experimental investigation

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Determiner phrases (DPs) under intensional operators give rise to multiple interpretations, known as the de re/de dicto ambiguity. Formal theoretical approaches to modeling this ambiguity must rely on nuanced semantic judgments, but inconsistent judgments in the literature suggest that informal judgment collection may be insufficient. In addition, little is known about how these ambiguities are resolved in context and how preferences between these readings vary by context and across individuals, etc. We reported three controlled experiments to systemize the truth-value judgment collection of de re/de dicto readings. While the de dicto readings were robustly accepted by nearly all English speakers, de re readings exhibited strongly bimodal judgments, suggesting an inherent disagreement among speakers. In addition, the acceptability of de re judgments was affected by the DP's internal structure as well as idiosyncratic scenarios. More broadly, our experimental results lend support...

Disambiguating quantity judgements: mass/count and extra-grammatical cues

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Comparative quantity judgements are a useful probe into the semantics of the mass/count distinction, where count nouns usually trigger cardinal comparisons (more dogs), and mass nouns trigger non-cardinal measurement (more rice). However, exceptions like 'object' mass nouns (furniture) and 'mixed' comparatives (more gold than diamonds) complicate this pattern. In such cases there is often a mismatch between the mass/count status of the noun and the criterion for comparison, which challenges our understanding of the mass/count distinction and how it affects quantity judgements. We propose that these mismatches reflect a systematic ambiguity, where the mass/count distinction is one of the factors influencing disambiguation. Using a new experimental method focused on ambiguity judgements instead of truth-value judgements, the results support the traditional semantic encoding of the mass/count distinction, with operations of 'packaging' and 'grinding' triggered by extra-grammatical...

On the acquisition of either and too

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper presents an experimental investigation of how English-learning children acquire the additive discourse particles either and too. In the target grammar these items exhibit near-complementary distribution conditioned on the polarity of their host sentence. The path leading to that grammar appears to be rather intricate. We present comprehension data showing that for an extended period of time (ages 3–5) learners find both items acceptable in both polarity environments, exhibiting only a weak adult-like tendency of preferring either in negative and too in positive sentences. At age 6 their grammar appears categorical wrt. either in that they no longer tolerate it in positive sentences while still exhibiting only a weak dispreference for too in negative environments. These findings are even more striking in the context of production data. We find that child-directed speech is essentially categorical, providing unambiguous...

Disagreements do not automatically raise the standard of precision

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Speakers often choose to utter imprecise sentences that, albeit felicitous, are, strictly speaking, false (e.g., using 'This bottle is empty' to describe a bottle with a bit of water in it). The acceptability of an imprecise utterance hinges on the standard of precision (SoP), a discourse parameter that governs how much imprecision is tolerated in a context. Previous theoretical accounts (e.g., Lewis 1979, Klecha 2018) have argued that metalinguistic denials that target the assertability of an imprecise utterance (e.g., 'No, this bottle is not empty!') more or less force accommodation to a higher SoP. The present study investigates the nature of this accommodation process. In particular, we ask whether metalinguistic disagreements result in an automatic update of the SoP. In two acceptability judgment experiments, we show that imprecise utterances are not deemed unacceptable when embedded in a disagreement dialogue. Our findings instead suggest that metalinguistic denials act...

Indirect discourse as mixed quotation? An experimental investigation

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The results of an experimental rating study are reported suggesting that self-pointing gestures aligned with a third-person pronoun are acceptable in German indirect discourse (ID) utterances. Following a proposal by Ebert & Hinterwimmer (2022) for self-pointing gestures in free indirect discourse (FID), self-pointing gestures in ID are interpreted as character viewpoint gestures (CVGs) quoted from the matrix subject. Crucially, it is argued that in ID, a perspective shift to the matrix subject can take place. It is proposed that ID is an instance of mixed quotation involving a demonstration (cf. Clark & Gerrig 1990, Davidson 2015) where self-pointing is quoted from the matrix subject's original utterance.

Relating Scalar Inference and Alternative Activation: A View from the Rise-Fall-Rise Tune in American English

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The rise-fall-rise (RFR) tune in American English has received numerous theoretical accounts to describe its meaning contribution, with a consistent theme being the relationship between RFR and "higher alternatives." However, Autosegmental-Metrical theory predicts three RFR-shaped tunes which differ in the rising pitch accent used (H*, L+H*, L*+H), raising the question of whether different RFR-shaped tunes in fact behave differently. We investigate this question under the lens of scalar inference (SI). We find that RFR-shaped tunes with different pitch accents behave similarly in offline interpretation, increasing the rate of SI calculation relative to falling tunes. In online processing using cross-modal priming with lexical decision, we find an asymmetry in the processing profile of two RFR-shaped tunes: H*L-H% leads to additional facilitation of the higher alternative, while L*+HL-H% leads to less facilitation. We describe these results in relation to differences in pitch range...

Coloring disjunction in child Romanian

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Romanian children have been shown to rarely interpret the complex disjunction sau...sau 'either...or' (as in sau trenul sau barca 'either the train or the boat') exclusively (that is, as 'only one, not both') in Truth Value Judgment Tasks. Instead, children often favor an inclusive interpretation ('one or both'), or a conjunctive interpretation ('both, not just one') (Bleotu et al. 2023, 2024a). Such findings contrast with those from Romanian adults, who consistently interpret this disjunction exclusively. In this study, we investigate whether children interpret sau...sau more exclusively in a Coloring Book Task (CBT), given previous evidence that children's performance is more adult-like in tasks involving coloring rather than in truth value judgment tasks. In line with this expectation, we observed an increase in the number of exclusive-responding children compared to previous findings for Romanian. However, it is important to highlight that most children still did not interpret...

Modeling the prompt in inference judgment tasks

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We show that when analyzing data from inference judgment tasks, it can be important to incorporate into one's data analysis regime an explicit representation of the semantics of the natural language prompt used to guide participants on the task. To demonstrate this, we conduct two experiments within an existing experimental paradigm focused on measuring factive inferences, while manipulating the prompt participants receive in small but semantically potent ways. In statistical model comparisons couched within the framework of probabilistic dynamic semantics, we find that probabilistic models structured, in part, by the semantics of the prompt fit better to data collected using that prompt than models that ignore the semantics of the prompt.

Modeling the Role of Polysemy in Verb Categorization

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Recent work has indicated that static word embeddings can predict human semantic categories (Majewska et al. 2021). In this paper, we consider the role of polysemy in semantic categorization, by comparing sense-level embeddings with previously studied static embeddings in their prediction of human-produced categories. We find that the polysemy is crucial for predicting human categories; sense-level embeddings dramatically outperform static embeddings in predicting semantic categories. Our findings highlight the role of polysemy in semantic categorization that is exclusively based on linguistic input.

Analyzing naturally-sourced Questions Under Discussion

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Question Under Discussion (QUD) framework of discourse has been a highly influential theoretical device in many accounts of various pragmatic phenomena, yet there has been comparatively little work assessing the extent to which the QUD can be reliably inferred from naturalistic contexts. In this paper, we focus primarily on measuring the variability across individuals in QUD inference, while also verifying other related, commonly held assumptions about QUD theory. To this end, we collect QUDs from many theoretically naive subjects tasked with processing a radio interview utterance by utterance. We consider various analyses designed to address the problem of measuring question similarity. Overall, we find that there exists moderate variability among subjects, consistent with possibly the insufficiency of context in determining QUD, or possibly also the simultaneous coexistence of multiple valid QUDs. To more adequately tease apart these possibilities, we also propose additional...

The rise and particularly fall of presuppositions: Evidence from duality in universals

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

At the center of this paper is the question whether presuppositions are more likely to be gained or lost in the process of language change. We offer a new experimental method that aims at ascertaining the re-learning speed of potentially presuppositional items based on nonce words and which integrates certain factors of change such as social prestige in an artificial but clearly contextualized set-up. The meaning targeted is of a quantifier meaning 'both' with speakers of German and the initial results point to higher ease of losing rather than incorporating the presupposition, but with an interesting resilience after a critical questioning of presuppositional status.

Beyond Surprising: English Event Structure in the Maze

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

To what extent can we tease apart semantic representations and processes from other influences on processing such as probabilistic prediction? In this paper I detail two experiments testing the hypothesis that there are semantic complexity in the lexical representations of result verbs that influences reaction times above and beyond probabilistic distributions. This is done by replicating a self-paced reading study from Levinson & Brennan (2016) while also modelling lexical surprisal. Experiment 1 replicates the original result, but only in experiment 2 using the maze task does the effect emerge beyond surprisals. The more focal maze task results suggest that processing costs associated with bieventive result verbs should be accounted for by grammatical factors, in addition to probabilistic prediction.

Corpus evidence for the role of world knowledge in ambiguity reduction: Using high positive expectations to inform quantifier scope

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every-negation utterances (e.g., Every vote doesn't count) are ambiguous between a surface scope interpretation (e.g., No vote counts) and an inverse scope interpretation (e.g., Not all votes count). Investigations into the interpretation of these utterances have found variation: child and adult interpretations diverge (e.g., Musolino 1999) and adult interpretations of specific constructions show considerable disagreement (Carden 1973, Heringer 1970, Attali et al. 2021). Can we concretely identify factors to explain some of this variation and predict tendencies in individual interpretations? Here we show that a type of expectation about the world (which we call a high positive expectation), which can surface in the linguistic contexts of every-negation utterances, predicts experimental preferences for the inverse scope interpretation of different every-negation utterances. These findings suggest that (1) world knowledge, as set up in a linguistic context, helps to effectively...

Informational content vs. discourse orientation: experimental and computational perspectives

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The aim of this study is to investigate how human speakers and computational language models process (i) the informational content and (ii) the discourse orientation of natural language sentences. These two dimensions of meaning have received little attention outside theoretical literature, especially in the computational linguistics domain. To help fill this void, we present the results of four experiments that exploit the specific semantics of two French adverbs, namely presque (≃ ’almost’) and à peine (≃ ’barely’), which put these two dimensions of meaning at odds. Each experiment focuses on one kind of population (humans or language models), and one kind of meaning (informational content or discourse orientation). Our results show that humans are indeed sensitive to informational content and discourse direction, as assumed in the theoretical literature. Language models exhibit a less transparent behavior. Their performances in dealing with the semantics of presque appear in...

Listeners use descriptive contrast to disambiguate novel referents and make inferences about novel categories

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In the face of unfamiliar language or objects, description is one cue people can use to learn about both. Beyond narrowing potential referents to those that match a descriptor, listeners could infer that a described object is one that contrasts with other relevant objects of the same type (e.g., “The tall cup” contrasts with another, shorter cup). This contrast may be in relation to other objects present in the environment or to the referent’s category. In two experiments, we investigate whether listeners use descriptive contrast to resolve reference and make inferences about novel referents’ categories. While participants use size adjectives contrastively to guide novel referent choice, they do not reliably do so using color adjectives (Experiment 1). Their contrastive inferences go beyond the current referential context: participants use description to infer that a novel object is atypical of its category (Experiment 2). Overall, people are able to use descriptive contrast to...

Fake reefs are sometimes reefs and sometimes not, but are always compositional

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The semantics of adjective modification often begins with set intersection,such that [[yellow flower]] = [[yellow]] ‚à© [[flower]]. Thus a yellow flower is a flower. Such an account, however, runs into problems for adjectives like fake or counterfeit, which display a privative inference: a fake gun is not a gun and a counterfeit dollar is not a dollar. Moreover, recent work shows privativity cannot easily be encoded as a property of specific adjectives like counterfeit, since e.g. counterfeit watch robustly licenses the subsective inference of being a watch (Martin 2022). We gather judgments on nearly 800 adjective-noun bigrams (of which 180 are novel, i.e. zero corpus frequency), andshow that privativity depends on the adjective, noun and context, and can be manipulated for the very same adjective-noun bigram by presenting it in different contexts. This poses a challenge for theories which fix privativity as a property of the adjective and always use the same method of composition...

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

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Five degrees of (non)sense: Investigating the connection between bullshit receptivity and susceptibility to semantic illusions

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Individual differences in people's tendency to see bullshit statements such as Perceptual reality transcends subtle truth as meaningful and possibly profound have become an active topic of research in judgment and decision making in recent years. However, (psycho)linguistics has so far paid little attention to the topic, despite its obvious appeal for language processing research. I present an experiment that investigated possible shared traits contributing to individual bullshit receptivity and susceptibility to semantic illusions, which occur when compositionally incongruous sentences receive plausible but unlicensed interpretations (e.g., More people have been to Russia than I have). The results show relatively little indication of an individual-level tendency to both fall for bullshit and for linguistic illusions. Implications for future psycholinguistic research into bullshit processing are discussed.

Incremental processing of telicity in Italian children

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A sentence like 'Lyn has peeled the apple' triggers two types of inferences: a telicity inference that the event is telic; and a culmination inference that the event has reached its telos and has stopped. This results in the final interpretation of the sentence that Lyn has completely peeled the apple. We present an eye-tracking study to test children's ability to predict the upcoming noun (e.g., the apple) during the incremental processing of sentences like 'Look at the picture in which he/she has peeled theвЂ¦' in which the predicate is telic and the verb appears in the perfective form. By means of the Visual World Paradigm, we aimed to investigate children's ability to use the lexical semantics and aspectual morphology of verbs during language processing. To test if children can predict the target (e.g., a completely peeled apple) by exploiting the lexical-semantic meaning of the verb, we contrasted the target picture with a picture of an object that cannot be peeled; to test...

Experimental findings for a cross-modal account of dynamic binding in gesture-speech interaction

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We report results of experiments on pronoun and presupposition binding across modalities. We show that ordinary pronouns (in the spoken/written domain) can be dynamically bound to gesturally introduced discourse referents and that presuppositions induced by spoken/written triggers (via e.g. 'again' or 'too') can be bound likewise. These experiments support research that has proposed the existence of cross-modal binding to motivate a formal framework that can account for interaction of various input of linguistic content from different dimensions and modalities.

Superlative-modified numerals and negation: A multiply negotiable cost

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Comparative-modified numerals (CMNs) and superlative-modified numerals (SMNs) are reported to exhibit a polarity sensitivity contrast: unlike CMNs, the use of SMNs is said to be sensitive to embedding under negation. This contrast is however neither well studied nor well understood, such that the existing views in the literature disagree vastly on both the basic facts and related expectations. In this paper we investigate this contrast in three offline experiments. We show that there is strong empirical support for this reported contrast under negation, but none of the existing analyses of the contrast can capture it in full, though we do seem to require insights from each.

The interpretations of scalar implicatures, presuppositions, and implicated presupposition by Thai children with autism

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Using the negated universal quantifier not every, the study investigates the interpretations of scalar implicatures, lexical presuppositions, and implicated presuppositions by Thai children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs; n= 32), compared to their typically-developing (TD) peers (n= 70) and adults (n= 40). The results provide further empirical evidence to the literature (Chevallier et al. 2010, Hochstein et al. 2017, Pijnacker et al. 2009) that not only do adolescents with ASD perform on par with TD adolescents, children with ASD are also age-appropriate in their performance on deriving scalar implicatures. Despite the children with ASD's ability to compute scalar implicature, they still tend to give more logical, literal responses, compared to their peers. Compared to adults, both children with ASD and TD children still have a higher tendency to rely on the logical meaning rather than pragmatically inferred meaning. They are also less likely than adults to derive scalar...

Is there a superlative rabbit in the ordinal hat? A study of ordinals vs. degree modifiers in nested definites

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This study probes how the semantics of ordinals relates to the semantics of comparatives and superlatives. We examine this question with the help of a picture task in which participants are asked to locate objects described by nested descriptions like the candle on the first/closer/closest table, with an ordinal, comparative or superlative modifier in the inner noun phrase. We show that ordinals systematically lack the 'relative readings' observed for unmodified nested descriptions like the rabbit in the hat, in which the inner definite is understood with enriched content, as in the rabbit in the hat with a rabbit in it, in contrast to superlatives. Our explanation for this relies on the idea that an ordinal expects an ordering that can be provided by context.

Parenthesized Modifiers in English and Korean: What They (May) Mean

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Although the semantics of some classes of parentheticals are well studied, such as appositives, there is relatively little work on parentheticals marked with parentheses. Lewen & Anderson (2022) analyze the semantics of a certain parenthesized construction they refer to as a restricted parenthesized parenthetical, and propose that the parentheses invoke and negate an alternative to the parenthesized content. This paper presents experimental evidence about the interpretation of parenthesized modifiers in Korean and English, manipulating syntactic position and modifier properties (scalar/non-scalar, categorical/continuous). In both languages, our results confirm Lewen & Anderson (2022)'s proposal that some alternative is negated; however, the impact of the modifier properties we explore is different in English and Korean. Our findings corroborate the richness of the (often neglected) semantico-pragmatic space of parenthesized content.

Less-comparatives must be less ambiguous than exactly-differentials, experimental data shows

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Scope mobility of comparative operators has been claimed to surface in a narrow class of specific cases where intensional verbs are combined with less-comparatives or exactly-differentials. Though not uncontroversial and dependent on subtle judgments, this type of ambiguity influenced subsequent compositional semantic analyses of comparatives and was also used as a diagnostics for scope mobility of the comparative operator in cross-linguistic studies. We use judgment data from three acceptability rating experiments to empirically test the (un)availablity of this ambiguity in German and English. We discover an empirical difference between exactly-differentials and less-comparatives which is unexpected under the standard approach to the semantics of comparatives. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings and highlight recent proposals that can account for our data.

Definitely Islands? Experimental investigation of definite islands

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Experimental work on islands has used formal acceptability judgment studies to quantify the severity of different island violations. This current study uses this approach to probe the (in-)violability of definite islands, an understudied island, in offline and online measures. We conducted two acceptability judgment studies and find a modest island effect. However, rating distributions appear bimodal across definites and indefinites. We also conducted a self-paced reading experiment, but found no sig- nificant effects. Overall, offline, definite islands differ from other uniform islands, but online, the results are more complicated.

Experientiality markers in memory reports: A semantics-pragmatics puzzle

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Some recent work in semantics and the philosophy of language suggests that the way we report events reflects whether we have personally experienced or witnessed these events (i.e. through linguistic elements dubbed 'experientiality markers'). This paper provides experimental support for one such marker: German non-manner uses of wie ['how']. We argue that when they are embedded under the memory predicates noch wissen ['still know'] and sich erinnern ['REFL-remind'], free relative wie-complements mark the remembering of a personally experienced event. We support this claim through a series of online studies based on scale judgements. The results of our main study raise questions about the semantics-pragmatics interface of the experientiality marking property of wie, and about the robustness of experientiality markers in general. A series of complementary studies address these questions.

"Liz can buy a croissant or donut. That's both together, right?" Distinguishing target Free Choice from non-target Modal Conjunction in Child French

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Several acquisition studies have reported that children draw free choice inferences at adult-like rates from modal disjunctive statements. This study explores an alternative explanation for children's seemingly adult-like behavior: modal conjunction, which shares verifying and falsifying conditions with free choice. However, existing experimental setups were not able to distinguish the two. With our novel design, we were able to set apart modal conjunctive interpreters from genuine free choice interpreters, using a new type of condition: a mutually exclusive context. The results revealed that free choice inferences are not so early acquired as previously thought. In contrast to the earlier studies, only half of the children between 4 and 6 were genuine adult-like free choice interpreters. The other children either show the basic inclusive interpretation of disjunction, or, as hypothesized, a modal conjunctive interpretation.

Pseudo-Incorporated Antecedents and Anaphora in Persian: The Influence of Stereotypical Knowledge

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There are different theories about the nature of pseudo-incorporated nouns (PINs), which feature a non-specific, number-neutral interpretation. For a proper analysis it is crucial to take their anaphoric potential into account. This paper investigates if and how PINs introduce discourse referents, with evidence from Persian, and which theory matches this behavior best. We report on experiments in which the stereotypical enrichment of the number-neutral interpretation was systematically varied with two types of biases — towards a singular or a plural interpretation — and in the neutral case, when such a bias is lacking. The results of the experiments are compatible with Krifka & Modarresi (2016), which considers PIN objects as dependent singular definites (similar to weak definites) within existential closure over an event variable.

Coming in, or going out? Measuring the effect of discourse factors on perspective prominence

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Although perspectival expressions are a diverse group, they share a common property: their meanings depend on the perspective of a discourse-given individual whose identity is under-specified. This paper investigates how perspective holder prominence is determined through a series of forced choice experiments on American English motion verbs exploring a number of discourse factors: definiteness, mention order, topicality, and subjecthood. The results suggest that both global and local prominence effects play a role in determining how perspectival motion verbs are interpreted.

Tracking the activation of scalar alternatives with semantic priming

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

From an utterance of Mary ate some of the deep dish, hearers frequently infer that Mary didn't eat all of the deep dish. Similarly, an utterance of The movie is good might lead hearers to conclude that the movie isn't excellent. These inferences are instances of scalar implicature (SI). The standard assumption is that SI arises via hearers' reasoning about alternative utterances that the speaker could have said, but did not. In particular, hearers are taken to consider stronger alternatives such as all (or Mary ate all of the deep dish) and excellent (or The movie is excellent) and derive their negation. In this study, we investigate the psycholinguistic reflexes of this inferential process. We use semantic priming with lexical decision to test whether lexical alternatives such as all and excellent are retrieved and activated in the processing of SI-triggering sentences. The results of our experiments indeed suggest that alternatives play a role in the processing of SI, though...

Semantics of Non-Doxastic Attitude Ascriptions from Experimental Perspective

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The paper presents novel experimental data regarding reports of non-doxastic attitudes (expressed by verbs such as "wants", "fear", "is glad", and etc.) As observed by some theorists, non-doxastic attitude ascriptions differ from the ascriptions of doxastic attitudes (e.g., "believes") in that they do not support simple entailments or presuppositions of their complement clause. In particular, an ascription may intuitively change its truth-value if we alter the informational structure of the embedded clause without modifying its truth conditions. We present two experiments whose results support this observation. Experiment 1 shows that the truth-value and acceptability judgements of non-doxastic attitude ascriptions in a context generally depend on the informational structure of the embedded clause. Experiment 2 reveals that the truth-value judgements vary if we manipulate not only the "presupposition-assertion" structure of embedded clause, but also the components related to non-presuppositional...

Social meaning and pragmatic reasoning: The case of (im)precision

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On the basis of a speaker's choice between linguistic alternatives, a hearer can draw inferences not only about facts of the world, but also about the social properties of the speaker. The goal of this work is to investigate how such social meanings arise, particularly in the case where the alternatives in question differ in their core logical or semantic meaning. Taking variation in numerical precision level as a case study, we seek to test the broad general hypothesis that social inferences may be derived via pragmatic reasoning about the needs of the situation, the epistemic state of the speaker, and the reasons for their choice of form. We report on two matched guise studies which demonstrate that the social meaning of (im)precision is sensitive to context and (to some extent) speaker knowledge state, and are correlated with inferred reasons for expression choice, findings which support the predictions of the pragmatic view.

(Not) acquiring meaning in a second language: Are input deficits key?

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Word meanings are not always parallel across languages, and second language (L2) learners often use words in non-native ways. Is the learning problem inherent in maintaining conflicting word-to-meaning mappings within an integrated lexical network, or is it due to insufficient attention to and input for acquiring L2 mappings? To help discriminate between these possibilities, we gave English speakers repeated exposures to 40 brief videos of actions, labeled with five novel words that cross-cut English labeling patterns. Half the participants were told only to learn the labels for the actions. The other half were told to figure out their meanings, which might differ from English. The Figure Out Meanings group made test choices faster and were also slightly more likely to produce definitions capturing the intended meanings. However, both groups performed well above chance in generalizing the novel words. High levels of choice performance for both groups point to insufficient input,...

An experimental investigation of perspective alignment in gesture and speech

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hinterwimmer et al. (2021) experimentally investigated the hypothesis that perspective in gesture and speech is by default aligned, i.e., when a character's or protagonist's perspective is conveyed in the speech signal, this utterance is preferably aligned with a character viewpoint gesture. If an utterance expresses an observer's perspective, by contrast, it is more likely accompanied by an observer viewpoint gesture. Their results, however, showed an overall preference for character viewpoint gestures. They argued that there were pragmatic factors (e.g., informativity) at play blocking the hypothesized perspective alignment. The study reported here further investigates Hinterwimmer et al.'s (2021) hypothesis by comparing two different character viewpoint gestures paired with a verbal utterance in a rating study. The results suggest that, contrary to Hinterwimmer et al.'s (2021) hypothesis, multiple, potentially non-aligned perspectives can be simultaneously expressed in gesture...

Non-Implicature Sources of Exclusivity in Linguistic Disjunction

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Disjunction in natural language alternates between an inclusive reading (A or B or Both) and an exclusive reading (A or B but not Both). Traditional accounts of this ambiguity focus on scalar implicature as the source of disjunction exclusivity, a process whereby Gricean reasoning over Horn scales strengthens the baseline inclusive reading to an implied exclusive reading (Grice, 1978; Horn, 1972; Gazdar, 1980). Despite nearly all theories acknowledging that other factors likely play a role in the generation of exclusivity implications, non-implicature factors have received comparatively little attention. Across four experiments we tested two such non implicature factors, prior compatibility and syntactic category, finding that both play a role in speaker interpretations of disjunctive sentences. Additionally, by drawing our stimuli in the first two experiments from the prior literature, we found evidence that previous research on disjunction, while accurately identifying the key...

Only the (informationally) stronger survive: A probe recognition study with scale-mates and antonyms

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Speakers often use scalar words such as warm in a pragmatically strengthened way that results in the conveyed meaning being warm but not hot. In these inferences, known as scalar implicatures, meaning alternatives have been postulated to play a crucial role. Upon encountering warm, the informationally stronger alternative hot has been shown to be active in online sentence processing. Antonyms (cool) have also been shown to be activated in the same way even though they are standardly assumed to not be involved in scalar implicature derivation. In the current study, we focus on the question of whether both strong scalar alternatives and antonyms are represented in the final mental model of the discourse following scalar implicature derivation. We ran two probe recognition experiments, testing strong scalars and antonyms. We found an interference effect for strong scalars, indicating their representation, but not one for antonyms. Thus, we provide evidence that only the strong scalars...

The role of definiteness in ad hoc implicatures

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This study investigates how ad-hoc implicatures and the definiteness presupposition of the definite determiner 'the' interact. Using a Truth Value Judgment Task (Crain & Thornton 2000), we examine whether English-speaking adults interpret the definite and indefinite determiner differently in sentence pairs such as: 'Mary bought a striped sweater' and 'Mary bought the striped sweater', in contexts in which there are two possible referents, one which is best described with one adjective (e.g. 'striped') and the other which is best described with two adjectives (e.g. 'striped' and 'spotted'). We find more ad hoc implicature for 'the' than 'a'; that is, uses of the definite 'the' are rejected more frequently than uses of 'a' when the purchased item would best be described with two adjectives. We take this finding to suggest that the need to satisfy the uniqueness presupposition of 'the' acts as an additional trigger for implicature generation. This result raises questions for...

Reciprocal predicates: a prototype model

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Many languages have verbal stems like hug and marry whose intransitive realization is interpreted as reciprocal. Previous semantic analyses of such reciprocal intransitives rely on the assumption of symmetric participation. Thus, 'Sam and Julia hugged' is assumed to entail both 'Sam hugged Julia' and 'Julia hugged Sam'. In this paper we report experimental results that go against this assumption. It is shown that although symmetric participation is likely to be preferred by speakers, it is not a necessary condition for accepting sentences with reciprocal verbs. To analyze the reciprocal alternation, we propose that symmetric participation is a typical feature connecting the meanings of reciprocal and binary forms. This accounts for the optionality as well as to the preference of this feature. Further, our results show that agent intentionality often boosts the acceptability of sentences with reciprocal verbs. Accordingly, we propose that intentionality is another typical semantic...

On a concessive reading of the rise-fall-rise contour: contextual and semantic factors

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper presents three auditory rating experiments on the rise-fall-rise contour (RFR). Experiment 1 provides experimental evidence that the RFR makes disagreeing with a prior statement more natural than neutral intonation would. Additionally, the data show that the RFR exhibits a valence asymmetry, noted by G√∂bel (2019): the amelioration of a disagreement is greater when the RFR is used in a positive reply to a negative statement than in a negative reply to a positive statement. Experiments 2 and 3 investigate factors contributing to this asymmetry, showing that it disappears in replies to questions and is weakened when the reply contains an additive particle. Based on these results, we argue that the RFR has a scalar meaning, following G√∂bel (2019), with the relevant scale being contextually determined and resulting in an ambiguity resembling the Focus-particle at least.

Testing the influence of QUDs on the occurrence of Conditional Perfection

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In natural language conversations, speakers often communicate 'if and only if' when they say 'if'. The reasons why in some circumstances, yet not all, conditionals receive a biconditional interpretation remain under investigation. Von Fintel (2001) proposed an account where the interpretation of a conditional ("if p, then q") is predicted to depend on the focus of the conversation which may either lie on the conditions that make the consequent, q, true or on the consequences following when the antecedent, p, is true. To test this account, we present two novel behavioral experiments with non-text based stimuli that take advantage of participants' intuitive understanding of physics. We find some supporting evidence for the tested account that is not conclusive but suggests that other aspects, like the nature of potential alternative causes for the consequent to become true (e.g., with or w/o the influence of an external variable), also play a role for the interpretation of the conditiona...

Transparency in the processing of temporal ambiguity: The case of embedded tense

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We report the results of one acceptability rating study and two self-paced reading studies on the form-meaning mismatch in the interpretation of past-under-past in complement clauses in English. Across the three experiments, we find an off-line and on-line preference for the backward-shifted interpretation, in line with predictions of the structural approach to the ambiguity when assuming a processing preference for morphological transparent interpretation.

Contrafactives, learnability, and production

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

No natural language has contrafactive attitude verbs. Because factives are universal across natural languages, this means that there is a major asymmetry between contrafactives and factives. We previously hypothesised that this asymmetry arises partly because the meaning of contrafactives is significantly harder to learn than that of factives. Here we test this hypothesis by using a production-oriented computational experiment that overcomes two limitations of our previous experiments. We find that our results do not support our previous hypothesis.

What's the smallest part of spinach? A new experimental approach to the count/mass distinction

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper reports on a study that uses a novel methodology, the minimal part identification task, in order to probe the relationship between morphosyntax and interpretation. English, Korean and Mandarin Chinese differ from one another with regard to the count/mass distinction. Building on prior research but using a new methodology, this study examines whether speakers of these three languages also differ in how they interpret count vs. mass nouns. The findings, while uncovering some language-specific effects of morphosyntax, point to the importance of universality, and suggest that interpretation drives morphosyntax rather than the other way around.

Cause, Make, and Force as Graded Causatives

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We investigate the semantics of the causal verbs cause, make, and force as used in the construction X {caused/made/forced} Y (to) Z. The predominant approach to analyzing verbs of causing has been to argue that they convey some version of SUFFICIENCY, but it has also been suggested that INTENTION or possible ALTERNATIVES may also factor into the semantics of the verbs. Using sequences of tic-tac-toe states as experimental stimuli, we measure the three possible contributing factors in each stimuli and ask participants whether each verb is appropriate for describing the sequence. We find experimental support for a differentiating semantics of these verbs, in which no single predictor is the sole factor in when each verb is appropriate.

Real-time processing of indexical and generic expressions: Insights from, and implications for, COVID-related public health messages

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We used COVID-related health messages to investigate the incremental processing of expressions such as you, we and people in generic contexts, to further our understanding of how these kinds of expressions are processed in real-time and to explore whether the ease of comprehending public health messages related to the COVID pandemic is influenced by type of referring expression. Results from a self-paced reading study point to an increased processing load in messages with the non-indexical form people (relative to we and you), which we suggest is separable from effects of word length and frequency. We interpret this as preliminary support for the Indexicality Hypothesis, which posits that expressions which can in principle receive indexical interpretations are easier to process than non-indexicals, and also emphasize the need for further work on these kinds of questions.

Are second language speakers more pragmatically tolerant? Explaining the differences in scalar implicature generation between L2 and L1

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Children's difficulties with Scalar Implicature (SI) generation have been argued to stem from their tolerance towards pragmatic violations rather than from issues with the inferential process per se (Katsos & Bishop 2011). Ternary judgment tasks have been used to support this view. In these tasks, when presented with underinformative sentences, children, as well as adults, choose an intermediate option between acceptance and rejection, thus demonstrating sensitivity to underinformativeness. Some recent studies show that adult second language (L2) speakers also generate SIs at lower rates. In this work, we investigated whether pragmatic tolerance, possibly emerging because of limited language exposure, could explain the difference between (adult) L2 and L1 speakers. Contrary to our expectations, neither our L1 control group nor our L2 groups (L2 High and L2 Low Proficiency) consistently selected the intermediate option when judging underinformative sentences. However, the L2...

Investigating a shared mechanism in the priming of manner and quantity implicature

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In the current paper, we investigate the existence of a shared derivation mechanism between manner and quantity implicature. As per the Gricean-inspired perspective, both manner and quantity implicature are derived in a substantially analogous fashion, relying on the consideration of alternative ways in which the speaker could have spoken, but didn't. In contrast, other accounts (e.g., grammatical accounts) of quantity implicature consider manner implicature and quantity implicature to be distinct in their derivational mechanisms.Previous studies have found that quantity implicature can prime the derivation of subsequent quantity implicature both within and between quantity implicature subtypes in a structural priming paradigm, suggesting that ad hoc, numeral and some quantity implicature are governed by the same derivational mechanism. We have applied a structural priming paradigm to the case of manner implicature to investigate 1) whether manner implicature can be primed, 2)...

Pseudo-scoping out of tensed clauses: cumulation vs. buildups

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Tensed complement clauses are often assumed to be scope islands for quan- tifier raising (QR) of universal quantifiers. However, as observed by Farkas & Gi- annakidou 1996, Barker 2022, Hoeks et al. 2022, a.o., there are apparent counterex- amples to this assumption, where a universal DP appears to scope out of a tensed complement clause to take scope over a singular indefinite in the matrix clause, hence- forth 'variation readings'. Hoeks et al. 2022 propose that QR out of tensed clauses is possible, but only in event structural configurations which involve buildup processes. In this paper, we report experimental results providing evidence that variation readings are not sensitive to buildups. We then offer an alternative analysis, capturing variation readings as a form of cumulation, and we present experimental results supporting this analysis. The empirical generalization suggests that tensed complement clauses are islands for QR after all, and apparent counterexamples...

Using the lower bound set by the universal modal to investigate the status of partial objects and count nouns

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Prior research has demonstrated that when given objects (e.g., forks) broken into pieces, children deviate from adults by counting each discrete object-piece as on par with a whole. A recent proposal ties this behavior to the vagueness and context-sensitivity inherent to count noun semantics. The present study leverages the universal modal have to in order to investigate how a linguistic context, one which sets lower bounds on numerals in its scope, regulates nominal application. Our results show that for children, who prefer the 'exact' reading of numerals, the partial object not only serves to meet the lower bound, but also exceeds a numerical upper bound. Adults, on the other hand, do not consider the partial object as meeting the lower bound induced by the modal. Because we cannot determine the explanation for this finding with our current design, we plan to adapt it to use the existential modal allowed to.

'Negation-blind' N400 effect disappears when lexical priming is controlled

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Previous ERP studies showed that false affirmative sentences elicited a larger N400 than their true versions, but they found the reverse pattern when the sentences were of negative form as if N400 was blind to negation. This negation-blind N400 pattern arguably constituted evidence for two-step accounts of negation processing: When processing negative sentences, a comprehender first computes an internal proposition and then considers the negation. However, the prior studies were confounded by a lexical priming relation between subject and object. Therefore, it was an open question whether or not the observed ERP pattern really reflected the two-step process. To tackle this question, we conducted an ERP experiment, using size-comparison statements where subjects and objects are semantically unrelated. This design allowed us to remove the priming confound. We predicted that if the previous negation-blind N400 pattern is unrelated to lexical priming, it would be replicated; if not,...

Causal selection – the linguistic take

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Causal Selection is a widely discussed topic in philosophy and the cognitive sciences, concerned with characterizing the choice of "the cause" among the many individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions on which any effect depends on. In this paper, we argue for an additional selection process underlying causal statements: Causative-Construction Selection, which pertains to the choice of linguistic constructions used to express causal relations. By exploring this phenomenon, we aim to answer the following question: given that a speaker wishes to describe the relation between one of the conditions and the effect, which linguistic constructions are available? We take CC-selection to be more crucial than causal selection, since the latter is in fact restricted by the linguistic options resulting from the former. Based on a series of experiments, we demonstrate that factors taken previously as contributing to causal selection should, in fact, be considered as the parameters...

Experimental Paradigms on Scalar Implicature Estimation

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Experimental research on the processing of Scalar Implicatures (SIs) relies on behavioral tasks that purport to measure the rate at which scalar implicatures are computed within an experimental paradigm. Two paradigms, the Truth Value Judgment Task (TVJT) (Gordon, 1998; Crain & Thornton, 2000) and the Picture Selection Task (PST) (Gerken & Shady, 1998) have dominated the experimental pragmatics literature; yet the effects of task choice on implicature rate have remained underexplored. Here we report the results of three studies testing participants in the TVJT and the PST using three different linguistic scales in English: "ad-hoc", "or-and", and "some-all". In the first experiment, the task variation was manipulated within subjects while in the second experiment, it was manipulated between subjects. The third experiment examined a variant of the PST called the Hidden Card Task (HCT) which is increasingly used in the context of priming research (Bott & Chemla, 2016)....

Representing affect information in word embeddings

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A growing body of research in natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU) is investigating human-like knowledge learned or encoded in the word embeddings from large language models. This is a step towards understanding what knowledge language models capture that resembles human understanding of language and communication. Here, we investigated whether and how the affect meaning of a word (i.e., valence, arousal, dominance) is encoded in word embeddings pre-trained in large neural networks. We used the human-labeled dataset (Mohammad 2018) as the ground truth and performed various correlational and classification tests on four types of word embeddings. The embeddings varied in being static or contextualized, and how much affect specific information was prioritized during the pre-training and fine-tuning phase. Our analyses show that word embedding from the vanilla BERT model (Devlin et al. 2019) did not saliently encode the affect information of English...

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

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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...

Investigating fragment usage with a gamified utterance selection task

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Nonsentential utterances, or fragments, like A coffee, please! can often be used to communicate a propositional meaning otherwise encoded by a complete sentence I'd 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...

Simulating semantic change: A methodological note

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The current work discusses the Human Diachronic Simulation Paradigm (HUDSPA), a method to experimentally probe into historical meaning change set up to (i) scan for configurations similar to attested alterations of meaning but in (typically, but not necessarily, related) languages or varieties which did not actualize the change(s) under investigations; (ii) measure the reactions of native speakers in order to ascertain the verisimilitude as well as the particular semantic and pragmatic properties of the items scrutinized. Specifically, the present paper discusses the relative propensity of a particularizer (German eben) to be interpreted with comparatively high confidence as a scalar additive particle such as even and of a concessive item like English though to be interpreted similar to a modal particle along the lines of German doch.

Discourse behavior of possessives reflects the importance of interpersonal relationships

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Nominal possessive constructions (e.g. Sam's car) present a challenge for theories of discourse since, unlike simpler nominal phrases (e.g. a car), they explicitly refer to two entities, not just one. Research on the discourse prominence of these two referents has been limited in scope and produced contradictory findings. We use a sentence continuation experiment to investigate the prominence of possessions as a function of their animacy. We find that possessed animates (e.g. her butler) are especially prominent. Their privileged status in discourse may relate to non-linguistic theories on the importance of interpersonal relationships.

On the interpretation of German einige. The effect of tense and cardinality

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We present a study investigating the effect of tense (past vs. future) on the computation of scalar implicatures in connection with the German quantifier einige 'some' in an interactive experiment, which included a financial incentive for participants to consider whether another speaker would share their judgment. We tested the hypothesis that scalar implicatures are less frequently drawn in future tense than in past tense. In addition, we studied to what extent sets with various cardinalities are prototypical representatives of einige + N. We hypothesized that larger cardinalities are more prototypical representatives of the quantifier einige than smaller cardinalities (relative to the cardinality of the total set). We analyzed the experimental data with probabilistic Bayesian models with a linking hypothesis between participants' responses and readings based on utility maximization in simple decision problems. In line with the hypotheses, we found that less scalar implicatures...

A nonce investigation of a possible conjunctive default for disjunction

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Our study explores whether there is a conjunctive default in the interpretation of disjunction, focusing on Romanian children's and adults' understanding of nonce functional words. We investigate how participants interpret novel connectors such as mo and mo...mo, which could theoretically correspond to '(both) A and B', '(either) A or B', or 'A not B' / 'neither A nor B'. Our results reveal that both adults and children overwhelmingly assign a conjunctive meaning to these nonce words. This suggests the existence of a conjunctive default in interpreting unknown operators linking two elements, which could explain why children have sometimes been found to interpret disjunctions as conjunctions in previous studies (Singh et al. 2016, Tieu et al. 2017, Bleotu et al. 2023). In particular, we discuss how this conjunctive default may influence Romanian children's interpretation of complex disjunctions such as fie...fie, potentially explaining why they treat these constructions conjunctively....

Or not Alternative Questions, Focus and Discourse Structure

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Or not alternative questions like Are you coming or not? give rise to so-called 'cornering effects' (Biezma 2009), consisting of two parts: (i) they cannot appear discourse-initially, and (ii) they do not allow for follow-up questions. Building on recent experimental data (Beltrama, Meertens & Romero 2020), the present paper raises problems for current analyses (Biezma 2009, Biezma & Rawlins 2012, 2018), reframes the second part of cornering as not specific to NAQs but as a general constraint on questions in general, and develops a novel proposal for the first part of cornering. The key ingredients of the new proposal are the intrinsic focus structure of or not questions and its effects on discourse trees.

Crosslinguistic differences on the Present Perfect Puzzle: An experimental approach

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper, we analyze how different temporal and referential properties of past-referring adverbials—specifically, hodiernality and deixis—are partially responsible for the crosslinguistic distribution of PAST and PERFECT markers across Dutch, Spanish, and English. To that end, we conducted an acceptability judgment task, where 160 subjects per language rated context-sentence pairs that display either a PAST or a PERFECT marker, and a temporal adverbial that is: (i) either temporally close to or temporally far from the speech time, and (ii), either deictic or not deictic. Results show that: (a) Dutch allows for its PERFECT marker to combine with any past-referring temporal adverbial, (b) Spanish only allows its PERFECT marker to combine with adverbials that locate the event temporally close to speech time, regardless of deixis, and (iii) that English prefers its PAST marker in all past-referring situations, but allows its PERFECT to combine with adverbials that are both deictic...

The enduring effects of default focus in let alone ellipsis: Evidence from pupillometry.

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The study of clausal ellipsis in sentence processing has revealed that comprehenders are sensitive to multiple, sometimes conflicting, pressures when recovering elided content. This paper presents a pupillometry experiment investigating how the human language processing system responds to sentences in which the location of a pitch accent clashes with global preferences for local correlates. The results are discussed in light of existing literature, including the Enduring Focus Principle, in which locations for default pitch accent continue to influence focus-sensitive processes regardless of overt markers of focus.

You must worry! The interpretation of mustn't varies with context and verbal complement

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We investigate experimentally whether American English adult speakers are influenced in their interpretation of mustn't by pragmatic context (contexts favoring lack of necessity/necessity not to readings) and/or the semantic properties of the verbal complements of the modal (verbs denoting events in the physical realm vs. verbs expressing undesirable mental activities). In an experiment combining a forced choice task and a gradient acceptability task, participants saw sentences containing mustn't and physical events/negative mental activities in lack of necessity/necessity not to contexts (e.g., You mustn't worry. The woman will give you money) They had to choose the most suitable interpretation of mustn't ('it is necessary not to'/'it is not necessary' interpretations). They then had to rate the acceptability of the sentences containing mustn't in context on a Likert scale from 1 to 7. We find that participants split into two groups: an Interdiction Group, which always treated...

Intention and Attention in Image-Text Presentations: A Coherence Approach

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In image-text presentations from online discourse, pronouns can refer to entities depicted in images, even if these entities are not otherwise referred to in a text caption. While visual salience may be enough to allow a writer to use a pronoun to refer to a prominent entity in the image, coherence theory suggests that pronoun use is more restricted. Specifically, language users may need an appropriate coherence relation between text and imagery to license and resolve pronouns. To explore this hypothesis and better understand the relationship between image context and text interpretation, we annotated an image-text data set with coherence relations and pronoun information. We find that pronoun use reflects a complex interaction between the content of the pronoun, the grammar of the text, and the relation of text and image.

Toward an accommodation account of deaccenting under nonidentity

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Two competing models attempt to explain the deaccentuation of antecedent-nonidentical discourse-inferable material (e.g., Bach wrote many pieces for viola. He must have LOVED string instruments). One uses a single grammatical constraint to license deaccenting for identical and nonidentical material. The second licenses deaccenting grammatically only for identical constituents, whereas deaccented nonidentical material requires accommodation of an alternative antecedent. In three experiments, we tested listenersвЂ™ preferences for accentuation or deaccentuation on nonidentical inferable material in out-of-the-blue contexts, supportive discourse contexts, and in the presence of the presupposition trigger too. The results indicate that listeners by default prefer for inferable material to be accented, but that this preference can be mitigated or even reversed with the help of manipulations in the broader discourse context. By contrast, listeners reliably preferred for repeated material...

Where truth and optimality part. Experiments on implicatures with epistemic adverbs

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In the current paper, we employ a novel Shadow Play Paradigm in order to test Romanian monolingual adults’ sensitivity to truth and informativeness and investigate their ability to derive implicatures with epistemic adverbs. We show that implicature rates with epistemic adverbs are higher when participants are asked to reward characters depending on the truth of their statements rather than on whether what they say is the best description of the situation. Given participants’ task-sensitivity, we recommend instructions using optimality criteria as a more sensitive method of probing into implicature generation.

The investigation of quantity implicatures during typical development: a systematic review

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The present work is a systematic review on the acquisition of quantity implicatures in typically developing children. The references were selected through the PRISMA method. The criteria for eligibility were that the articles should be peer-reviewed, published articles written in English, containing empirical data on the comprehension of quantity implicatures in first language acquisition during typical development. The aim of this review is three-fold. First, to provide a picture of what empirical data tells us about the acquisition of quantity implicatures, based on both lexical and ad-hoc scales, potentially contributing to theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. Second, to analyze the methodologies that have been used to test children and their adequacy. And lastly to evaluate whether or not systematic review is an accurate analysis method for this type of varied and often complicated data. The results suggest that children improve in implicature derivation with age, especially...

Shadow playing with Romanian 5-year-olds. Epistemic adverbs are a kind of magic!

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The current paper employs a novel Shadow Play Paradigm to investigate the semantic knowledge and pragmatic ability of Romanian 5-year-olds with respect to the epistemic adverbs poate 'maybe' and sigur 'certainly'. The paradigm is an improved version of the Hidden Object Paradigm, where, instead of merely looking at an inaccessible entity, participants can now infer the presence of the entity on the basis of evidence (a shadow, as well as a specific sound). We argue that Romanian children as young as 5 are able to derive implicatures with epistemic adverbs at an almost adult-like level. However, they exhibit the tendency to accept overly strong statements (i.e., statements where a certainty adverb is wrongly used instead of a possibility adverb) as optimal to a much higher degree than adults. This can be explained as a cognitive/communicative strategy to reduce multiple alternatives to a single one in cases of uncertainty.

When Transformer models are more compositional than humans: The case of the depth charge illusion

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

State-of-the-art Transformer-based language models like GPT-3 are very good at generating syntactically well-formed and semantically plausible text. However, it is unclear to what extent these models encode the compositional rules of human language and to what extent their impressive performance is due to the use of relatively shallow heuristics, which have also been argued to be a factor in human language processing. One example is the so-called depth charge illusion, which occurs when a semantically complex, incongruous sentence like No head injury is too trivial to be ignored is assigned a plausible but not compositionally licensed meaning (Don't ignore head injuries, even if they appear to be trivial). I present an experiment that investigated how depth charge sentences are processed by Transformer models, which are free of many human performance bottlenecks. The results are mixed: Transformers do show evidence of non-compositionality in depth charge contexts, but also appear...

Overspecification of small cardinalities in reference production

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper presents experimental evidence for overspecification of small cardinalities in refer-ence production. The idea is that when presented with a small set of unique objects (2, 3 or 4), the speaker includes a small cardinality while describing given objects, although it is overin-formative for the hearer (e.g., 'three stars'). On the contrary, when presented with a large set of unique objects, the speaker does not include cardinality in their description — so she produces a bare plural (e.g. 'stars'). The effect of overspecifying small cardinalities resembles the effect of overspecifying color in reference production which has been extensively studied in recent years (cf. Rubio-Fernandez 2016, Tarenskeen et al. 2015). When slides are flashed on the screen one by one, highlighted objects are still overspecified. We argue that one of the main reasons lies in subitizing effect, which is a human capacity to instantaneously grasp small cardinalities.

Devoir, ou pouvoir, that is the question

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In languages like French and English, modals express either possibility (e.g., "you can") or necessity (e.g., "you must"). Previous acquisition research has shown that English-speaking children have particular difficulty with necessity modals: comprehension experiments show that they tend to accept must or have-to in possibility scenarios (Noveck 2001, Özturk & Papafragou 2015, a.o.); production studies show that they use them less frequently than possibility modals, and when they do, their usage is not always adult-like (Dieuleveut et al. 2022). But the cause of this "Necessity Gap" remains debated. One challenge is that past studies have focused primarily on English, where necessity modals are much rarer than possibility modals in parental speech, which could suggest that the delay is simply due to less exposure. In this study, we demonstrate through a corpus analysis of French young children's modal use and their linguistic input, as well as experiments based on this data...

Comparing Global and Local Accommodation: Rating and Response Time Data

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper addresses the question to what extent global and local accommodation should be viewed as sharing the same underlying mechanism or whether they are distinct processes that only happen to share the same label. We present offline rating data and response times from a mouse-tracking experiment that directly compared global and local accommodation for five different triggers. The results show that globally accommodating a presupposition led to a larger decrease in acceptance than locally accommodating, and that response times for local accommodation were overall faster. While we take the results to be inconclusive with regard to the question about the underlying mechanism, we conjecture that the contexts tested here were more favorable for local accommodation, and that hence investigating how different contexts affect the relative ease of accommodation type is a promising avenue for future research.

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

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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 data on the competition between definites and indefinites

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper, we report on four experiments investigating obligatory presupposition effects. Specifically, we look at the inferences arising from not using presupposition triggers when their use is supported by the context. We compare these inferences and the contextual factors for their derivation to presuppositions and implicatures. Extending previous work, we explore not only the English definite determiner "the" but also the dual "both" and their respective competition with the universal quantifiers "every" and "all".

The role of relevance, competence, and priors for scalar inferences

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Although it is often assumed that the natural language expressions 'some' and 'or' are interpreted according to their first-order logic counterparts, in certain contexts, they receive a narrower interpretation: 'some' is strengthened to 'some, but not all', and 'or' to 'A or B, but not both'. This process is typically explained as an instance of scalar inference. To test this scalar implicature hypothesis, we collect experimental evidence for the effects and interactions of three factors that should affect the robustness of the scalar inferences of 'some' and 'or': the relevance of the stronger alternative, the speaker's competence about the alternative, and the prior probability that the alternative is true. We find that the interpretation of both triggers was affected by speaker competence, but only 'some' was also affected by prior probability, while relevance did not affect either trigger. Ultimately, our results suggest that the interdependence of the three factors is more...

A conceptual analysis of verbs of pushing and pulling

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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...

Default biases in the interpretation of English negation, conjunction, and disjunction

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Previous research has hypothesized default interpretive biases for three types of ambiguities with English logical words and, or, and not. First, disjunction (A or B) is hypothesized to be biased towards an exclusive interpretation in upward-entailing environments and an inclusive interpretation in downward-entailing environments (Levinson 2000, Chierchia 2004, Breheny et al. 2005). A negated disjunction (not A or B) is claimed to be biased towards a "neither-nor" interpretation (i.e. wide scope negation: ¬[A ^ B]) and a negated conjunction is said to be biased towards an "either-not" interpretation (i.e. wide-scope negation: ¬[A ^ B]) (Szabolcsi 2002, Szabolcsi & Haddican 2004). We tested these hypotheses within the same experimental paradigm with 149 English-speaking participants and found disjunction to be biased towards an inclusive interpretation across three different entailment environments: episodic declaratives, questions, and conditional antecedents. Our results...

Generics as default? Comparing the acquisition of universals and generics in Spanish

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper reports an experiment that investigates interpretive distinctions between two different expressions of generalization in Spanish. In particular, our aim was to find out when the distinction between generic statements (GS) such as Tigers have stripes and universal quantified statements (UQS) such as All tigers have stripes was acquired in Spanish-speaking children of two different age groups (4/5-year-olds and 8/9-year-olds), and then compare these results with adults. The starting point of this research was the semantic distinction between GS and UQS in that the former admits exceptions, unlike the latter. On the other hand, cognitive psychologists have observed a Generic overgeneralization effect (GOG) consisting in allowing for UQS to be felicitous in the face of exceptions, thus proposing that this ‘error’ stems from people misinterpreting UQS as GS and from GS being defaults (simpler, more easily learned and processed) instead of involving quasi-universal quantification,...

Tattoos as a window onto cross-linguistic differences in scalar implicature

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper addresses the question of how to predict which alternatives are active in scalar implicature calculation, and the nature of this activation. It has been observed that finger implicates 'not thumb', and a Manner-based explanation for this has been proposed, predicting that if English had the simplex Latin word pollex meaning 'thumb or big toe', then finger would cease to have the implicature 'not thumb' that it has. It has also been suggested that this hypothetical pollex would have to be sufficiently colloquial in order to figure in scalar implicature calculation. This paper makes this thought experiment into a real one by using a language that behaves in exactly this way: Spanish has pulgar 'thumb' (pollex), a non-colloquial form. We first use a fill-in-the-blank production task with both English and Spanish speakers to guage the likelihood with which a speaker will produce a given form as a way of describing a given digit. Production frequency does not perfectly track...

How to compute a focus: Evidence from incremental processing

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The global interpretation of a focus marked sentence with a particle like only arises due to the interplay of several formal components: F-marking, the semantics of the particle, the nature of contrastive alternatives, and a dependence on context. In this paper, we argue that on-line reading measures can be used to probe which of these com- ponents are computed when. In order to isolate which components give rise to reading slowdowns typically observed on foci (Birch & Rayner 1997, Benatar & Clifton 2014, Lowder & Gordon 2015, Hoeks et al. 2023), a Maze reading study tested whether such slowdowns still arise on second-occurrence foci (SOF)‚Äîfoci whose inferences have already been computed in prior discourse and are therefore entirely predictable‚Äîand on foci whose size and location can only be determined via a previously introduced contrast. Results indeed showed slowdowns on such foci, suggesting that these cannot solely be attributed to readers computing focal...

Reading times show effects of contextual complexity and uncertainty in comprehension of German universal quantifiers

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We report three experiments, in which we combined self-paced reading with picture-sentence verification to test how reading times are affected by meaning-related processes. In particular, we investigated German sentences containing the universal quantifier alle ("all") and examined how restrictive processes incrementally interact with other aspects of quantifier meaning, comparably to previous studies using other methods. Our results show that reading times were sensitive towards a match between context and sentence meaning and also towards an interaction between picture complexity and task demands. The results also point to the need for integrated processing models that combine refined notions of the relation between memory and expectations, on the one hand, with assumptions about adaptive processes and about representations involved in compositional interpretation, on the other.

Seeing vs. Seeing That: Children's Understanding of Direct Perception and Inference Reports

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Young children can reason about direct and indirect visual information, but fully mapping this understanding to linguistic forms encoding the two knowledge sources appears to come later in development. In English, perception verbs with small clause complements ('I saw something happen') report direct perception of an event, while perception verbs with sentential complements ('I saw that something happened') can report inferences about an event. In two experiments, we ask when 4-9-year-old English-speaking children have linked the conceptual distinction between direct perception and inference to different complements expressing this distinction. We find that, unlike older children or adults, 4-6-year-olds do not recognize that see with a sentential complement can report visually-based inference, even when syntactic and contextual cues make inference interpretations highly salient. These results suggest a prolonged developmental trajectory for learning how the syntax of perception...

Constructing focus alternatives from context and the limits of semantic priming

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Interpreting focus requires a comprehender to identify the set of alternatives intended by the speaker. Previous psycholinguistic research has characterized this process in terms of a two-stage model that initially forms an alternative set via the context-insensitive mechanism of semantic priming (Gotzner et al. 2016, Husband & Ferreira 2016). We have instead advanced a one-stage immediate-access model, in which alternatives are immediately constructed from the discourse context (Muxica & Harris to appear). In two cross-modal probe recognition task experiments, we further test our prediction that the discourse context strongly influences response speed at early moments of focus interpretation. The results are interpreted as uniquely supporting the immediate-access model.

Proportions vs. cardinalities: Comparative ambiguities and the COVID pandemic

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper reports two psycholinguistic experiments on quantity comparatives and superlatives that are potentially ambiguous between cardinal and proportional readings. By using statements about COVID cases and vaccination numbers as a naturalistic context with real-world relevance, this work furthers our understanding of what happens in linguistic environments where multiple measure functions are available—what modulates the choice between them? The results provide new evidence that comparatives and superlatives can refer to scales ranging over degrees of proportion, in addition to degrees of cardinality. Furthermore, this experimental evidence points to a preference for cardinal interpretations, but also show that this is not rigid and can be weakened in favor of proportional readings by semantic factors—including considerations potentially related to stage- vs. individual-level differences—and by certain linguistic forms.

Clause types and speech acts in speech to children

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The question of how and when children learn to associate clause type with its canonical function, or speech act, is currently unknown. It is widely observed that declaratives tend to result in assertions, interrogatives in questions, and imperatives in requests. Although such canonical links between clause type and speech acts are principled, they are known to be defeasible. In this corpus study, we investigate how parents talk to their children in the first years of life, and ask how their input might support this mapping, and to what extent it might pose difficulties. We find that the expected link between clause type and speech act is robust in the input, particularly between declaratives and assertions, both of which also occur most frequently. In addition, the non-canonical mappings that do occur are characterized formally, e.g., non-interrogative questions nearly always exhibit rising prosody, and non-imperative requests often contain a modal.

Being tall compared to compared to being tall and being taller

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper investigates the semantics of implicit comparatives (Alice is tall compared to Bob) and its connections to the semantics of explicit comparatives (Alice is taller than Bob) and sentences with adjectives in plain positive form (Alice is tall). We consider evidence from two experiments that tested judgments about these three kinds of sentence, and provide a semantics for implicit comparatives from the perspective of degree semantics.

Effects of instruction on semantic and pragmatic judgment tasks

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Sentence judgment tasks are used often in linguistics studies. However, there is no consensus on how significant the effect of instruction is in such tasks: some argue that instruction is trivial, while others argue that they affect the way participants respond. In this study, we investigate different keywords used in sentence judgment tasks and determine which keyword best teases apart speakers' response to semantically and pragmatically licit and illicit sentences. We test this in English and Mandarin, exploring the possibility of cross-linguistic variation on how speakers respond to different keywords. Our results show that the common keywords used in semantic and pragmatic judgment tasks such as 'natural' do distinguish semantic and pragmatic violations for English speakers, but that the common Mandarin translations of these words fail to distinguish between the two types of violations. Our results highlight the need for language- and study-specific norming procedures in sentence...

Mechanistic Support Language in Colombian Spanish-speakers

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Beyond basic spatial relations (e.g., teddy on table), we know little about how children learn to talk about Mechanical Support events (e.g., objects attached/hung from a surface via tape) and map them onto linguistic structures. Moreso, the majority of the research that has been done focuses on children learning English - a language that has several verbs that lexicalize support via a specific mechanism (Levin, 1993; e.g., glue, tape, clip, etc.). The current study seeks to deepen our understanding of spatial language acquisition by diversifying the populations that have been studied. Specifically, 4- to 6-year-old monolingual Spanish-speaking children and adults in Colombia viewed Mechanical Support events (e.g., girl puts paper on door via tape) and were then asked, 'Can you tell me what my sister did with my toy?'. Both children and adults used Non-Mechanism (e.g., poner = 'put', colgar = 'hang') and Mechanism Verbs (e.g., pegar = 'stick'); the use of Mechanism Verbs increased...

Nonboolean Conditionals

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On standard analyses, indicative conditionals behave in a Boolean fashion when interacting with and and or. We test this prediction by investigating probability judgments about sentences of the form "If A, then B {and, or} if C, then D". Our findings are incompatible with a Boolean picture. This is challenging for standard analyses of ICs, as well as for several nonclassical analyses. Some trivalent theories, conversely, may account for the data.

Insensitivity to truth-value in negated sentences: does linear distance matter?

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Affirmative sentences are comprehended more quickly when they are true vs. false but this facilitation is often reduced or absent in negative sentences, yielding a so-called negation-by-truth-value interaction. The reduced sensitivity to truth-value has been attributed to processing difficulties triggered by negation. We investigated whether difficulties such as these were eased when comprehenders were given more time to process the negator. Specifically, we compared negated sentences in which the negator immediately preceded an adjectival predicate vs. occurred earlier in the sentence, separated by several words from the predicate. The results of two sentence-picture matching tasks replicated previous findings of increased processing difficulties in negative vs. affirmative sentences, as well as the negation-by-truth-value interaction. However, we did not find evidence that sensitivity to truth-value was modulated by the distance between the negator and the predicate. Our findings...

Incremental interpretation of discourse coherence: Evidence from reading times

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In some discourses, a given inference would be natural at one point, but impossible at the next. We focus here on such cases with inferences of temporal and causal order usually described as ambiguities of discourse coherence. The fact that these inferences come and go over the course of a discourse raises challenges for their representation within theories of dynamic semantics: representations must either include coherence-related meaning in a way that can be selectively edited later, or else persistently underspecify it. As theories of humans' actual cognitive states, these approaches make different predictions for patterns of difficulty during real-time comprehension. Borrowing a standard assumption from sentence processing, true incremental representation should be associated with some detectable "Regret" when a comprehender meets input incompatible with a previously-preferred analysis. Previous work on the processing of coherence has failed to demonstrate Regret, leaving...

Delayed structural prediction for relative clauses: A new argument for learning to parse from Santiago Laxopa Zapotec

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Comprehenders in many of the world's languages exhibit a preference or a greater ease in comprehending transitive relative clauses (RCs) when associating the dislocated head with a subject position. Some theories relate this preference to an early prediction that an animate head will serve as a subject. We present a picture selection experiment with eye-tracking investigating the role of such predictions in comprehending transitive RCs in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec, an Oto-Manguean language of southern Mexico where RCs are ambiguous unless they contain a resumptive pronoun. Patterns of offline choices and incremental looking suggest that Santiago Laxopa Zapotec comprehenders avoid forming predictive interpretations of the RC head, and do not take its animacy into account in early processing. Instead, comprehenders exhibit a later, animacy-sensitive bias to interpret the RC-internal co-argument as a subject. Overall, we take this pattern as evidence that a comprehender's structural...

The Role of Reinforcement Learning in Pragmatic Reasoning Tasks: Modeling and Validating the Sources of Individual Differences

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In Gricean pragmatics, inference during communication is regarded as a form of rational, domain-general reasoning about the intentions of other agents. Studies using the pictorial communication "reference game" task are sometimes used in support of this hypothesis. Yet, measures of pragmatic reasoning in this task sometimes reveal poor performance, with participants requiring many rounds of play before they exhibit patterns which match Gricean inferences, and demonstrating substantial individual differences in behavior. Do these results challenge the idea of widespread inferencing via fundamental social competence? We advance an alternative proposal here, which posits that these patterns emerge as a factor of the way participants perform pragmatic reasoning in a task: namely, they prefer to use simpler interpretation strategies until experience motivates the use of additional resources. Building off of work modeling task adaptation as reinforcement learning, we use the cognitive...

Integrating language model embeddings into the ACT-R cognitive modeling framework

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In 2025, psycholinguistic research has the benefit of large, high-quality datasets of human behavior, and massively-scalable metrics for variables of interest like frequency and association. This means we have more data than ever before to shed light on classic language processing phenomena like associative priming. But in order to build and test rigorous theories against this data, we also need computational modeling tools that can simulate cognitive mechanisms and generate quantitative predictions at the same scale. In this paper, we assemble one such case, adapting the ACT-R cognitive modeling framework to make use of association metrics derived from language model embeddings, in service of a scalable model of associative priming in the Lexical Decision Task. ACT-R implements a model of memory retrieval that can use itemwise predictors like frequency and association to predict task response times (RTs), via interpretable and meaningfully-parameterized components like spreading...

The Semantics of Degree Relatives

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Relative clauses can range over degrees, just as they can range over individuals. But this class of degree relatives is rarely studied uniformly across the diverse constructions they help form. As a result, there have been a number of construction-specific proposals to model the semantics of degree relatives: in equatives, amount relatives, and wh -exclamatives. The goals of this article are to review a standard semantics of relativization writ large, to supplement it with standard assumptions from degree semantics, and to explain how the previously strange behavior of a variety of constructions formed from degree relatives comes out as a natural consequence of a handful of straightforward assumptions. Specifically, I argue that degree relatives are just relative clauses that range over degrees, and that these degree readings of relative clauses are available wherever we have ( a ) the appropriate morphology (e.g., a relativizer that can range over degrees), ( b ) a context of...

Manner implicatures and how to spot them

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The goal of this paper is to help develop a general picture of conversational implicature (Grice, 1975) by looking beyond scalar implicature to see how the phenomenon behaves in a general sense. I focus on non-scalar Quantity implicatures and Manner implicatures. I review canonical examples of Manner implicature, as well as a more recent, productive one involving gradable adjective antonym pairs (Rett, 2015). Based on these data, I argue that Manner implicatures—and conversational implicatures generally—are distinguishable primarily by their calculability; their reinforceability; their discourse sensitivity (to the Question Under Discussion; Roberts, 1990; van Kuppevelt, 1995; Simons et al., 2011); and their embeddability (under negation, propositional attitude verbs, quantifiers, etc.). I use these data to draw conclusions about the usefulness of implicature-specific operators and about ways to compositionally represent conversational implicatures.

Book review of Yoad Winter’s Elements of formal semantics (2016)

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Yoad Winter’s (2016) new textbook, “Elements of formal semantics”, is a formally sophisticated introduction to semantic theory. It treats standard beginner topics (e.g. transitivity, quantifiers, relative clauses) carefully and efficiently, using a directly compositional lambda calculus.

Evaluativity across adjective and construction types: An experimental study

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An adjectival construction is evaluative if and only if it conveys that the property associated with the adjective exceeds a relevant threshold. The questions of which adjectival constructions are evaluative and why have formed the foundation for semantic theories of these constructions and of adjectives themselves (Klein 1980, von Stechow 1984), although it has been alleged that these theories are based on an incomplete picture of the phenomenon of evaluativity (Bierwisch 1989, Rett 2008a). We present the first experimental tests of the scope and nature of evaluativity across adjectival constructions and adjective types. These studies confirm that evaluativity is conditioned by adjective type (relative or absolute, Kennedy & McNally 2005) and is not restricted to the positive construction. However, they also show several new and surprising aspects of evaluativity: that it is perhaps better characterized as a gradable property than a binary one; that the ways in which...