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Readings of Plurals and Common Ground

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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

This paper asks two questions: (i) In an ambiguous context, what is the interpretation of a sentence like The men wrote musicals? (ii) How can we succinctly characterize the differences between readings that a sentence has in an ambiguous context, versus readings made available in a specialized context, and those available only because of shared knowledge? While these questions have received much attention, e.g. [1, 9,10,11, 20,21,22,23,24, 26] i.a., the number of readings such a sentence has in an ambiguous context remains controversial, as is the availability of additional readings, and the means by which speakers become attuned to readings in a given context. To answer the first question we conducted an online study where participants evaluated the truth value of sentences designed to test the meaning of those like The men wrote musicals. Results suggest that such sentences get a double cover interpretation (i.e. an interpretation in terms of a relation between sets of individuals, rather than a relation strictly between atomic individuals) in an ambiguous context. We couch these results and the discussion on the availability of other readings in terms of a bipartite Common Ground, where available readings are in the Immediate Common Ground, and other readings can be made available via knowledge in the General Common Ground, thereby answering the second question.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    While it could be the case that the use of The musicians as opposed to the plural pronoun could be taken as an indication that one of Alex, Billie, and Charlie is not a musician, we contend that these sentences still allow for the reading in which Alex, Billie, and Charlie are all musicians.

  2. 2.

    Though \(p \sqcup q\) is only a subpart of \(p \sqcup q \sqcup r\), this reading is assumed to be canceled via implicature.

  3. 3.

    Although conditions negating just one of the collective and distributive readings respectively are close to 50%, they are significantly different (\(p<0.001\)) than an artificial data set in which the same number of items were equally split between true and false judgments.

  4. 4.

    Among the possible interpretations of the results, one might argue that the presence of negation in the follow-up sentences might be the reason why the participants judged them to be false—i.e. negative sentences could have made the parsing harder and the judgment more difficult. We thank the anonymous reviewer for the observation. However, to disambiguate between alternative analyses—two-reading analyses versus many-reading analyses—it was necessary to have a negation in the test sentence since the positive equivalent would not distinguish between the two alternatives. In order to make the control sentences comparable, it was sensible to keep negation in all the sentences, to avoid a result biased by the presence of negation in the test sentences but not in the control ones. In this way, the difference between response rates for control sentences and test sentences is not attributable to the presence or absence of negation.

  5. 5.

    AT(d) is the set of atoms below d: if d \(\in \) D then AT(d) \(=\) {a \(\in \) AT:a \(\sqsupseteq \) d}.

  6. 6.

    One function of the type shifting operation \( \uparrow \) is to turn plural individuals into group atoms; see [20] for details.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Kurt Erbach & Leda Berio

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  1. Kurt Erbach
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  2. Leda Berio
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Correspondence to Kurt Erbach .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universität Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

    Jennifer Sikos

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

    Eric Pacuit

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Erbach, K., Berio, L. (2019). Readings of Plurals and Common Ground. 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_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-59620-3_2

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