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Disjunction Under Deontic Modals: Experimental Data

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At the Intersection of Language, Logic, and Information (ESSLLI 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 11667))

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Abstract

The meaning components of may/or and must/or sentences have been discussed intensively by a number of theoretical accounts. The debates are concerned with whether free choice inferences are part of logical meaning or scalar implicatures, and additionally, whether exhaustive inferences and exclusive or inferences are derived for may/or versus must/or. In this study, two experiments were conducted for the purpose of evaluating the assumptions of three representative accounts, namely, Fox [10], Geurts [12] and Simons [20]. Each experiment separately examined the availability and processing time-course of the three types of inferences associated with may/or versus must/or sentences. The experimental results fit Simons’s [20] analysis to a large extent.

My thanks go to Dr. Yaron McNabb for supervising the study, Dr. Rick Nouwen and Dr. Henriette de Swart for suggestions, Chris van Run for the ZEP scripts and the anonymous reviewers for the feedback.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    More specifically, based on Simons’s [20] account (i.e., [20]), the contrast between may/or and must/or sentences lies in the availability of exhaustive inferences, while based on Fox [10] or Alonso-Ovalle’s [3] account (i.e., [10] or [3]), the contrast between the two sentences lies in exclusive or inferences instead.

  2. 2.

    I selected these accounts for discussion because they come up with a uniform analysis for both may/or and must/or sentences and they make assumptions about all three types of inferences. Many accounts in literature, e.g. Barker [5] and Starr [21], mention nothing about must/or sentences.

  3. 3.

    The reason why the stronger alternatives containing the individual disjuncts, i.e., \(\Diamond \)(Mary eat an apple) and \(\Diamond \)(Mary eat a banana), cannot be negated is that they are not “innocently excludable” (p. 24). If they are negated at the same time, the derived inferences will be in conflict with the truth of (1).

  4. 4.

    \(\lnot \) \(\Box \)(Mary eat an apple) is equivalent to \(\Diamond \) \(\lnot \)(Mary eat an apple), but is crucially different from \(\lnot \) \(\Diamond \) (Mary eat an apple). So the inference that Mary is not under the obligation to eat an apple does not imply that Mary is not allowed to eat an apple.

  5. 5.

    Geurts [12] adopted novel semantics for both disjunction and modals. More specifically, he followed Zimmermann’s [24] idea to make “or” present a list of alternatives. And inspired by Kratzer [15], he further suggested that expressions containing modals are context-dependent and this context-dependence might be of a presuppositional nature.

  6. 6.

    Considering the fact that in psycholinguistic experiments the difference in the types of tasks involved causes crucial differences in results, here I only discuss the experimental studies which adopt the experimental method similar as the one I used, i.e., a binary picture-sentence verification task.

  7. 7.

    Information about ZEP can be found at https://www.beexy.nl/.

  8. 8.

    Outliers are more than 1.5 IQRs below the first quartile or above the third quartile.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands

    Ying Liu

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  1. Universität Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

    Jennifer Sikos

  2. Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Eric Pacuit

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Liu, Y. (2019). Disjunction Under Deontic Modals: Experimental Data. In: Sikos, J., Pacuit, E. (eds) At the Intersection of Language, Logic, and Information. ESSLLI 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11667. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-59620-3_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-59620-3_12

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