Abstract
This work deals with the notion of argumentation and the way it is treated in a Bayesian perspective on reasoning and natural language interpretation. I am especially interested in the way the linguistic structure of utterances affect the way they are interpreted. Specifically, I argue that the sum of meanings conveyed by an utterance cannot be fed into such models indiscriminately and that the at-issue content of an utterance prevails in its argumentative interpretation. I support my claim by focusing on the case of the adverb only and by presenting the results of experiments which show that utterances that have similar informational contents do not behave the same way when they are argumentatively evaluated.
This research was supported in part by the Erasmus Mundus Action 2 program MULTI of the European Union, grant agreement number 2010-5094-7.
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Notes
- 1.
This contrasts with situations where a scalar paraphrase might appear disputable, e.g. as in (21-a) below. In such cases the question of the scalarity of only becomes relevant, cf. (Winterstein 2012). As already stated we leave those cases outside the scope of this study.
- 2.
Of course, it can be argued that this falls out only by adopting a strong reading of (11-a), i.e. one where half is interpreted in an exact manner. Some accounts claim that this is the result of a quantity implicature, which is notably defeasible and should not be integrated in the informational content of an utterance. However, the case of numerals and quantities like half is known to be peculiar in this regard. Typically, (i) could denote both a situation where the tank is more than half empty or less than half empty, meaning that half easily keeps its exact reading under negation, something which is harder for elements like some. I will therefore assume that the argument in (11-a) is done with an exact reading of half.
-
(i)
The tank is not half empty.
It should however be noted that ultimately I argue for the fact that an argument is evaluated only in the light of its asserted content (see Sect. 3.3). Therefore, in the case of (11-a) the relevant reading for evaluating the argument will indeed be a lower-bounded one. Nevertheless, the utterance can still be considered as conveying an overall exact reading.
-
(i)
- 3.
Here recall that \(n=P(e|T)\) and \(l=P(\lnot e|\lnot T)\). In (17-a), the denominator P(e) is expressed as the sum \(P(e|\lnot T)P(\lnot T)+P(e|T).P(T)\) via the product rule. The same operation gives \(P(\lnot e)\) in (17-b).
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Winterstein, G. (2015). Layered Meanings and Bayesian Argumentation: The Case of Exclusives. In: Zeevat, H., Schmitz, HC. (eds) Bayesian Natural Language Semantics and Pragmatics. Language, Cognition, and Mind, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17064-0_8
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