語用論(Pragmatics)を考える

This paper investigates the way that linguistic expressions influence vagueness, focusing on the interpretation of the positive (unmarked) form of gradable adjectives. I begin by developing a semantic analysis of the positive form of ‘relative’ gradable adjectives, expanding on previous proposals by further motivating a semantic basis for vagueness and by precisely identifying and characterizing the division of labor between the compositional and contextual aspects of its interpretation. I then introduce a challenge to the analysis from the class of ‘absolute’ gradable adjectives: adjectives that are demonstrably gradable, but which have positive forms that relate objects to maximal or minimal degrees, and do not give rise to vagueness. I argue that the truth conditional difference between relative and absolute adjectives in the positive form stems from the interaction of lexical semantic properties of gradable adjectives—the structure of the scales they use—and a general constraint on interpretive economy that requires truth conditions to be computed on the basis of conventional meaning to the extent possible, allowing for context dependent truth conditions only as a last resort.

/pdf/vagueness-and-grammar-the-semantics-of-relative-and-absolute-4fhroy6ika.pdf

Vagueness and grammar: the semantics of relative and absolute gradable adjectives

The World Atlas of Language Structures Online

Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik

The Acquisition of IT

This paper explores what children and adults know about three specific ways that meaning and context interact: the interpretation of expressions whose extensions vary in different contexts (semantic context dependence); conditions on the felicitous use of expressions in a discourse context (presupposition accommodation) and informative uses of expressions in contexts in which they strictly speaking do not apply (imprecision). The empirical focus is the use of unmodified (positive form) gradable adjectives (GAs) in definite descriptions to distinguish between two objects that differ in the degree to which they possess the property named by the adjective. We show that by 3 years of age, children are sensitive to all three varieties of context– meaning interaction and that their knowledge of this relation with the definite description is appropriately guided by the semantic representations of the GA appearing in it. These findings suggest that children’s semantic representations of the GAs we investigated and the definite determiner the are adult-like and that they are aware of the consequences of these representations when relating meaning and context. Bolstered by adult participant responses, this work provides important experimental support for theoretical claims regarding the semantics of gradable predicates and the nature of different types of ‘interpretive variability’, specifically semantic context dependence v. pragmatic tolerance of imprecision.

/pdf/meaning-and-context-in-children-s-understanding-of-gradable-2ohcl0h1hg.pdf

Meaning and Context in Children's Understanding of Gradable Adjectives

Experimental Evidence for the Truth Conditional Contribution and Shifting Information Status of Appositives

15 sentence in which they appear. Here, we address this question head-on experimentally. We first investigate the information status of appositives and find that while nominal appositives (e.g. a classical violinist) and sentence-medial appositive relative clauses (e.g. who is a classical violinist) are largely not at issue, sentence-final appositive relative clauses can become at issue, as witnessed in their becoming the target of a direct rejection and 20 being associated with subsequent questions. We then investigate the truth conditional contribution of appositives to sentences in which they appear, and find that whenever an appositive is false, participants judge the entire sentence False. Reaction times complement truth value ratings to demonstrate that this decision is largely automatic. We discuss possible reasons for the difference among appositive types and sentential

Experimental Evidence for the Truth Conditional Contribution and Shifting Information Status of

1 of 22 firstname.lastname @ rutgers.edu http://sites.rutgers.edu/kristen-syrett RESEARCH INTERESTS Broad: Language Acquisition, Psycholinguistics, Semantics, Pragmatics, Syntax and interaction among them; Prosody Narrow: word learning, form-meaning correspondences, sentence comprehension, measurement, quantification, comparison, numerals, plurals, ellipsis, adjectives, adverbs, at-issueness, covert movement, implicature calculation

Learning about the structure of scales: Adverbial modification and the acquisition of the semantics of gradable adjectives

http://user.keio.ac.jp/~kawahara/pdf/DeprezEtAl_Lingua.pdf

Kristen Syrett

Papers

Meaning and Context in Children's Understanding of Gradable Adjectives

Experimental Evidence for the Truth Conditional Contribution and Shifting Information Status of Appositives

Experimental Evidence for the Truth Conditional Contribution and Shifting Information Status of

Learning about the structure of scales: Adverbial modification and the acquisition of the semantics of gradable adjectives

The interaction of syntax, prosody, and discourse in licensing French wh-in-situ questions §