Speaker: Peter Graff (MIT)
Title: Constraints on Possible Meanings
Time: Tues 10/26, 12pm
Location: 46-3189
The meanings of natural language determiners can be understood as relations between sets (Barwise and Cooper, 1981). It has since been noted that natural language determiners are crucially constrained in the set relations they can express. One influential formalization of this typological pattern is Conservativity (Keenan and Stavi, 1986), a constraint taken to universally hold for all denotations of natural language determiners. In this talk we propose a second universal generalization over possible denotations in natural language, which we term Myopia. We show that this constraint not only excludes many denotations of natural language determiners previously excluded by Conservativity, but also generalizes to predicates of all other lexical categories, including nouns, verbs, adpositions and adjectives. We go on to present evidence from an on-line artificial determiner learning study (N=217), showing that both Conservativity and Myopia are active in determiner learning. Conservative determiners are easier to acquire than non-conservative myopic determiners, which in turn are easier to acquire than non-conservative non-myopic determiners providing further evidence that absolute typological universals may have different relative impact on language learning.