Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigate the influence of the adverb surprisingly on themeaning of the quantity words few and many, which them-selves have been associated with a reading expressing sur-prise. To learn about the meaning contribution of “surprise”,we compare surprisingly with the intensifier incredibly anda compared to phrase explicitly marking surprise. Based onan empirical measure of subjects’ expectations about everydayevents, a Bayesian model uses data from a sentence judgmenttask to infer likely levels of surprise associated with the differ-ent constructions of interest.