WHAT: Practice talks for CLS
WHEN: April 5th, Monday, 11.30AM – 1PM
WHERE: 32-D831
Talk 1: Gregory Scontras (Harvard University), Peter Graff (MIT), and Noah Goodman (MIT)
Title: Comparing Pluralities
Talk 2: Luka Crnic
Title: Imperatives in Unconditionals
Speakers have reliable truth-judgments when comparing pluralities. The semantics of these constructions, however, cannot straightforwardly follow from the semantics generally assumed for comparatives (e.g., von Stechow 1984, Heim 1985, Kennedy 1997) or plurals (e.g., Link 1983, Landman 1989, Schwarzschild 1996). Past work on plural comparison (Matushanksy and Ruys, 2006) attempts to capture speakers’ intuitions in a semantics that reduces plural comparison to a multitude of comparisons between the individual members of compared pluralities. We present experimental evidence that plural comparison does not reduce to the comparison of degrees true of individual members, but rather to the comparison of collective degrees inferred from the pluralities involved.
Our results support the hypothesis that a plurality can have a single degree associated with it that differs from the maximal degrees true of each of its parts, and that this degree is calculated by averaging the maximal degrees of the individuals belonging to the plurality. Thus, collective properties of pluralities are compared. Plural comparison then proceeds just as singular comparison, where the property relevant for comparison is inferred by averaging the degrees associated with the individual members of each plurality. Translating differences between pluralities into a probabilistic truth value significantly improves the model’s fit to human data. Ongoing work investigates how the gradience in human judgments arises.