Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
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Cross-linguistics difference in disjunction in two-dimensional semantics
Full text linkDisjunction, expressed by or in English, is a primary connective available in natural language. It was traditionally analyzed as the counterparts of the Boolean connectives ∨ (e.g., Montague 1973), but subsequent studies revealed a number of inadequacies in this approach, which led to the ‘dynamic turn’ in natural language semantics (Karttunen 1974; Heim 1982; et seq). However, the empirical base of the literature almost exclusively comprises examples of English. The cross-linguistic (in)adequacy of the theory has yet to be investigated. This paper addresses this research gap by inspecting disjunction in Japanese. More specifically, this paper examines the (non-)replicability of the observations that support the dynamic analysis for English ‘φ or ψ’ that hardwires the local context ¬φ. I argue that Japanese disjunction exhibits some kinds of evidence for the local context, but not others
Embedded scalar diversity
Full text linkThis paper is an experimental investigation of embedded scalar implicatures in the context of scalar diversity. We test whether a sentence such as Every student read some of the books leads to the implicature that No student read all of the books, and similarly whether Every soup was warm leads to the implicature that No soup was hot—across 42 different lexical scales. We find 1) that embedded implicatures arise; 2) that there is across-scale variation in embedded implicatures, paralleling scalar diversity among global implicatures; and 3) that properties of alternatives (namely, semantic distance and boundedness) that predict global scalar diversity predict variation at the embedded level too. It is argued that these findings are most compatible with an account of embedded implicatures that builds on alternatives, such as the grammatical theory (i.a., Chierchia 2004; Chierchia, Fox & Spector 2012), a modified neo-Gricean account such as Sauerland (2004), or the “neo-Gricean uncertainty” version of the Rational Speech Act with lexical uncertainty account (RSA-LU, Potts, Lassiter, Levy & Frank 2015). They are, however, less compatible with the “unconstrained uncertainty” RSA-LU model (Bergen, Levy & Goodman 2016; Potts et al. 2015), which leaves unexplained (without further assumptions) why the same alternative-driven variation should occur both in global and embedded implicatures
Coarse Modality with Italian Magari
Full text linkKratzer’s (1981a) classic quantificational account of natural language modality relies on premise sets (ordering sources) to derive the preorder on the domain of quantification required to get the truth conditions right. On the basis of novel data from Italian documenting a particular type of epistemic modal statements that come with an “antievidential” character, this paper advances a new argument for employing premise sets as opposed to taking orders as a primitive (Lewis 1981)
An experimental investigation of perspective alignment in gesture and speech
Full text linkHinterwimmer 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 and speech
Only the (informationally) stronger survive: A probe recognition study with scale-mates and antonyms
Full text linkSpeakers 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 survive in the eventual representation of the pragmatic meaning of a sentence
Constructing focus alternatives from context and the limits of semantic priming
Full text linkInterpreting 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
Pseudo-scoping out of tensed clauses: cumulation vs. buildups
Full text linkTensed 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 are due to other mechanisms
Deglottalizing contamination in A\u27ingae historical derivatives
No full textI describe and analyze the phonological form and historical trajectory of nominal derivatives in A’ingae (ISO 639-3: con), an underdocumented Amazonian isolate. Some words historically derived with otherwise preglottalized nominalizers have no glottalization today. I propose that these “exceptions” are reflexes of originally glottalized words, which underwent semantic shift and lost glottalization due to contamination from the plain (i.e. non-glottalized) majority. The paper thus documents a rare case where non-productive morphological patterns are the innovation, not retention
Are we biased against AI-made haiku poems?
Full text linkHaiku is a traditional Japanese unrhymed short poem of 17 syllables with ‘a seasonal word’ and ‘a cut letter’ to divide 17 syllables into smaller units of [5][75], [57][5], or [5][7][5]. Due to its brevity, haiku often lack arguments and predicates, and a cut letter separates the text into smaller parts, making it difficult to establish local coherence. However, Gilbert (2024) claims that the play of disjunction and coherence is a taproot of haiku. Haiku, or a version of it, is now written by poets worldwide and even by AI. This paper examines how humans evaluate AI-generated haiku poems through experiments.
Recently, AI-generated text has made much progress in art and literary works. Kawamura and his team (2019, 2021, among others) have generated 100 million AI- generated haiku via three steps: (i) deep learning of 400,000 haiku by Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and making word sequences, (ii) filtering out the word sequences for the traditional 17-syllable rule and a seasonal word, and (iii) scoring the generated haiku (cf. Hirata et al. 2022). They report that the scoring process is the most challenging.
Chamberlain et al. (2017) claim that humans have a bias against computer-generated art, and we will investigate whether this bias also applies to AI-generated haiku in this paper. Three in-person experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 aimed to establish a standard for evaluating human-generated haiku. Experiments 2 and 3 investigated how humans evaluate AI-generated and human-generated haiku based on the evaluation standard gained by Experiment 1. We recruited 140 university students and asked them to evaluate 30 human-generated and AI-generated haiku on a 5-point Likert scale. In Experiment 3, but not in Experiment 2, the subjects were informed which haiku was AI-generated. After Chamberlain et al., we predicted human-generated haiku would be more highly evaluated, but the results show that human cognition is more complex
How can zenme(yang) be so?
Full text linkThis paper observes that zenme(yang) ‘how’ in Mandarin Chinese can be used not only to express manners but also to convey degrees. A unified compositional analysis of zenme(yang) ‘how’ has been provided to account for the fact that zenme(yang) can be used across two domains: manners and degrees. By borrowing Anderson & Morzycki (2015)’s proposal on the anaphoric words tak and jak, zenme(yang)’s two uses can be modeled by the general notion of kinds: manner zenme(yang) modeled as kinds of events and the degree use modeled as state kinds. For the manner use, zenme(yang) with wh feature is base-generated on the head position of DegP under AP and its trace undergoes the Kind-Shift after wh-movement, which leads to a manner question. Regarding the degree use, zenme(yang), which takes a kind as its complement, needs the negation marker bu ‘not’ to license it. Hence, by borrowing the general notion of kind, it becomes feasible to achieve a compositional unification for the two uses of zenme(yang)