The present study investigates whether quantifier scope is computed incrementally during online sentence processing. We exploited the free word order in German to manipulate whether the verbal predicate preceded or followed the second quantifier in doubly quantified sentences that required the computation of inverse scope. A possessive pronoun in the first quantifier that had to be bound by the second quantifier was used to enforce scope inversion. We tested whether scope inversion causes difficulty and whether this difficulty emerges even at (...) a point before comprehenders have encountered the main verb. We report three pretests and two reading time experiments. The first two pretests were offline tests that established (1) that the sentences exhibited the assumed scope preferences and (2) that variable binding forced scope inversion. The third pretest employed self-paced reading to show that interpreting a bound variable is not difficult per se and that difficulty in the critical construction must thus be due to inverting scope. Incremental processing of quantifier scope was investigated in a self-paced reading experiment. We observed difficulty right after the second quantifier, but only if it appeared after the main verb, that is, after the predication was complete. Further evidence for late scope inversion comes from an eyetracking experiment. Again, a scope inversion effect could only be observed at the end of the sentence. Taken together, our study demonstrates that in German inverse scope is only computed at the sentence boundary. (shrink)

The scalar approach to negative polarity item (NPI) licensing assumes that NPIs are allowable in contexts in which the introduction of the NPI leads to proposition strengthening (e.g., Kadmon & Landman 1993, Krifka 1995, Lahiri 1997, Chierchia 2006). A straightforward processing prediction from such a theory is that NPI’s facilitate inference verification from sets to subsets. Three experiments are reported that test this proposal. In each experiment, participants evaluated whether inferences from sets to subsets were valid. Crucially, we manipulated whether (...) the premises contained an NPI. In Experiment 1, participants completed a metalinguistic reasoning task, and Experiments 2 and 3 tested reading times using a self-paced reading task. Contrary to expectations, no facilitation was observed when the NPI was present in the premise compared to when it was absent. In fact, the NPI significantly slowed down reading times in the inference region. Our results therefore favor those scalar theories that predict that the NPI is costly to process (Chierchia 2006), or other, nonscalar theories (Giannakidou 1998, Ladusaw 1992, Postal 2005, Szabolcsi 2004) that likewise predict NPI processing cost but, unlike Chierchia (2006), expect the magnitude of the processing cost to vary with the actual pragmatics of the NPI. (shrink)

We discuss a well-known puzzle about the lexicalization of logical operators in natural language, in particular connectives and quantifiers. Of the many logically possible operators, only few appear in the lexicon of natural languages: the connectives in English, for example, are conjunction _and_, disjunction _or_, and negated disjunction _nor_; the lexical quantifiers are _all, some_ and _no_. The logically possible nand (negated conjunction) and Nall (negated universal) are not expressed by lexical entries in English, nor in any natural language. Moreover, (...) the lexicalized operators are all upward or downward monotone, an observation known as the Monotonicity Universal. We propose a logical explanation of lexical gaps and of the Monotonicity Universal, based on the dynamic behaviour of connectives and quantifiers. We define update potentials for logical operators as procedures to modify the context, under the assumption that an update by \( \phi \) depends on the logical form of \( \phi \) and on the speech act performed: assertion or rejection. We conjecture that the adequacy of update potentials determines the limits of lexicalizability for logical operators in natural language. Finally, we show that on this framework the Monotonicity Universal follows from the logical properties of the updates that correspond to each operator. (shrink)

The 2007 edition of the Amsterdam Colloquium is the Sixteenth in a series which started in 1976. Originally, the Amsterdam Colloquium was an initiative of the Department of Philosophy of the University of Amsterdam. Since 1984 the Colloquium is organized by the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) of the University of Amsterdam.

Modified numerals, such as at least three and more than five, are known to sometimes give rise to ignorance inferences. However, there is disagreement in the literature regarding the nature of these inferences, their context dependence, and differences between at least and more than. We present a series of experiments which sheds new light on these issues. Our results show that the ignorance inferences of at least are more robust than those of more than, the presence and strength of the (...) ignorance inferences triggered by both at least and more than depends on the question under discussion, and whether ignorance inferences are detected in a given experimental setting depends partly on the task that participants are asked to perform. We offer an Optimality Theoretic account of these findings. In particular, the task effect is captured by assuming that in performing an acceptability task, participants take the speaker’s perspective in order to determine whether an expression is optimal given a certain epistemic state, while in performing an inference task they take the addressee’s perspective in order to determine what the most likely epistemic state of the speaker is given a certain expression. To execute the latter task in a fully rational manner, participants have to perform higher-order reasoning about alternative expressions the speaker could have used. Under the assumption that participants do not always perform such higher-order reasoning but also often resort to so-called unidirectional optimization, the task effect finds a natural explanation. This also allows us to relate our finding to asymmetries between comprehension and production that have been found in language acquisition. (shrink)

1 Logic in philosophy The century that was Logic has played an important role in modern philosophy, especially, in alliances with philosophical schools such as the Vienna Circle, neopositivism, or formal language variants of analytical philosophy. The original impact was via the work of Frege, Russell, and other pioneers, backed up by the prestige of research into the foundations of mathematics, which was fast bringing to light those amazing insights that still impress us to-day. The Golden Age of the 1930s (...) deeply affected philosophy, and heartened the minority of philosophers with a formalanalytical bent. As Brand Blanshard writes in Reason and Analysis (1964) – I quote from memory here, to avoid the usual disappointment when re-reading an original text. (shrink)

Natural language sentences that talk about two or more sets of entities can be assigned various readings. The ones in which the sets are independent of one another are particularly challenging from the formal point of view. In this paper we will call them ‘Independent Set (IS) readings’. Cumulative and collective readings are paradigmatic examples of IS readings. Most approaches aiming at representing the meaning of IS readings implement some kind of maximality conditions on the witness sets involved. Two kinds (...) of maximization have been proposed in the literature: ‘Local’ and ‘Global’ maximization. In this paper, we present an online questionnaire whose results appear to support Local maximization. The latter seems to capture the proper interplay between the semantics and the pragmatics of multi-quantifier sentences, provided that witness sets are selected on pragmatic grounds. (shrink)

Given current data, only a few binary Boolean operators are expressed in lexically simple fashion in the world's languages: and, or, nor. These do not occur in every combination, for example, nor is not observed by itself. To explain these cross‐linguistic patterns, we propose an encoding of Boolean operators as update procedures to accept or reject information in a context. We define a measure of conceptual simplicity for such updates, on which attested operators are conceptually simpler than the remaining Booleans. (...) Moreover, we show that language evolution selects for the attested lexical inventories by minimizing the complexity of using a lexical inventory compositionally to convey precise information. (shrink)

This paper revisits intervention effects in Mandarin Chinese why-questions. I present a novel empirical generalization, in which it is shown that the ability for quantifiers to induce intervention hinges upon their monotonicity and their ability to be interpreted as topics. I then propose a semantic account of intervention that correlates topicality with the monotone properties of intervening operators. A crucial assumption in this account is that why-questions in Chinese are idiosyncratic, in that the Chinese equivalent of why directly merges at (...) a high scope position that stays above a propositional argument. Combining the semantic idiosyncrasies of why-questions with the theory of topicality, I conclude that a wide range of intervention phenomena can be explained in terms of interpretation failure. (shrink)

Emotive-factive predicates, such as surprise or be happy, are a source of empirical and theoretical puzzles in the literature on embedded questions. Although they embed wh-questions, they seem not to embed whether-questions. They have complex interactions with negative polarity items such as any or even, and they have been argued to preferentially give rise to weakly exhaustive readings with embedded questions. We offer an empirical overview of the situation in three experiments collecting acceptability judgments, monotonicity judgments, and truth-value judgments. The (...) results straightforwardly confirm the special selectional properties of emotive-factive predicates. More interestingly, they reveal the existence of strongly exhaustive readings for surprise. The results also suggest that the special properties of emotive-factives cannot be solely explained by their monotonicity profiles, because they were not found to differ from the profiles of other responsive predicates. (shrink)

Linguists often sharply distinguish the different modules that support linguistics competence, e.g., syntax, semantics, pragmatics. However, recent work has identified phenomena in syntax (polarity sensitivity) and pragmatics (implicatures), which seem to rely on semantic properties (monotonicity). We propose to investigate these phenomena and their connections as a window into the modularity of our linguistic knowledge. We conducted a series of experiments to gather the relevant syntactic, semantic and pragmatic judgments within a single paradigm. The comparison between these quantitative data leads (...) us to four main results, (i) Our results support a departure from one element of the classical Gricean approach, thus helping to clarify and settle an empirical debate. This first outcome also confirms the soundness of the methodology, as the results align with standard contemporary accounts of scalar implicature (SI), (ii) We confirm that the formal semantic notion of monotonicity underlies negative polarity item (NPI) syntactic acceptability, but (iii) our results indicate that the notion needed is perceived monotonicity. We see results (ii) and (iii) as the main contribution of this study: (ii) provides an empirical interpretation and confirmation of one of the insights of the model-theoretic approach to semantics, while (iii) calls for an incremental, cognitive implementation of the current generalizations, (iv) Finally, our results do not indicate that the relationship between NPI acceptability and monotonicity is mediated by pragmatic features related to Sis: this tells against elegant attempts to unify polarity sensitivity and Sis (pioneered by Krifka and Chierchia). These results illustrate a new methodology for integrating theoretically rigorous work in formal semantics with an experimentally-grounded cognitively-oriented view of linguistic competence. (shrink)

The present event‐related potential (ERP) study used picture–sentence verification to investigate the neurolinguistic correlates of the online processing of compositional‐semantic information. To this end, we examined context effects on sentences involving temporal adverbial quantification likeJana war jeden Morgen schwimmen an den Arbeitstagen (“Jana went for a swim every morning during the working week”). We tested whether the conceptual complexity associated with quantifying over time intervals leads to delayed predictions regarding the upcoming words in a sentence. The present study replicated previous (...) results relating to quantification over individuals, which are conceptually less complex than time intervals. Analogous to previous studies, false vs. true sentences elicited an N400 whenever contextual cues did not permit a potential revision of a locally assigned truth value. The present results are compatible with an approach under which contextual cues are immediately considered for predicting how a sentence continues. The fact that the contextual complexity did not lead to processing delays indicates that the processing system quickly abstracts away from the conceptual complexity associated with the linguistic input if such an abstraction is possible. (shrink)

There is a widely held view that visual representations (images) do not depict negation, for example, as expressed by the sentence, “the train is not coming.” The present study focuses on the real-world visual representations of photographs and comic (manga) illustrations and empirically challenges the question of whether humans and machines, that is, modern deep neural networks, can recognize visual representations as expressing negation. By collecting data on the captions humans gave to images and analyzing the occurrences of negation phrases, (...) we show some evidence that humans recognize certain images as expressing negation. Furthermore, based on this finding, we examined whether or not humans and machines can classify novel images as expressing negation. The humans were able to correctly classify images to some extent, as expected from the analysis of the image captions. On the other hand, the machine learning model of image processing was only able to perform this classification at about the chance level, not at the same level of performance as the human. Based on these results, we discuss what makes humans capable of recognizing negation in visual representations, highlighting the role of the background commonsense knowledge that humans can exploit. Comparing human and machine learning performances suggests new ways to understand human cognitive abilities and to build artificial intelligence systems with more human-like abilities to understand logical concepts. (shrink)

Things we can say, and the ways in which we can say them, compete with one another. And this has consequences: words we decide not to pronounce have critical effects on the messages we end up conveying. For instance, in saying Chris is a good teacher, we may convey that Chris is not an amazing teacher. How this happens is an unsolvable problem, unless a theory of alternatives indicates what counts, among all the things that have not been pronounced. It (...) is sometimes assumed, explicitly or implicitly, that any word counts, as long as that word could have replaced one that was actually pronounced. We review arguments for going beyond this powerful idea. In doing so, we argue that the level of words is not the right level of analysis for alternatives. Instead, we capitalize on recent conceptual and associated methodological advances within the study of the so-called “language of thought” to reopen the problem from a new perspective. Specifically, we provide theoretical and experimental arguments that the relation between alternatives and words may be indirect, and that alternatives are not merely linguistic objects in the traditional sense. Rather, we propose that competition in language is significantly determined by general reasoning preferences, or thought preferences. We propose that such non-linguistic preferences can be measured and that these measures can be used to explain linguistic competition, non-linguistically, and more in depth. (shrink)

Next SectionWe discuss the thesis formulated by Hintikka (1973) that certain natural language sentences require non-linear quantification to express their meaning. We investigate sentences with combinations of quantifiers similar to Hintikka's examples and propose a novel alternative reading expressible by linear formulae. This interpretation is based on linguistic and logical observations. We report on our experiments showing that people tend to interpret sentences similar to Hintikka sentence in a way consistent with our interpretation.

This paper is a brief history of natural logic at the interface of logic, linguistics, and nowadays also other disciplines. It merely summarizes some facts that deserve to be common knowledge.

This paper focuses on two interrelated issues about the prospects for research projects in experimental philosophical logic. The first issue is about the role that logic plays in such projects; the second involves the role that experimental results from the cognitive sciences play in them. I argue that some notion of logic plays a crucial role in these research projects, and, in turn, the results of these projects might inform substantive debates in the philosophy of logic.