{"id":3012,"date":"2018-09-17T14:00:20","date_gmt":"2018-09-17T13:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lel.ed.ac.uk\/cle\/?p=3012"},"modified":"2018-09-29T19:09:56","modified_gmt":"2018-09-29T18:09:56","slug":"18-september-mora-maldonado","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/2018\/09\/17\/18-september-mora-maldonado\/","title":{"rendered":"25\u00a0September: Mora Maldonado"},"content":{"rendered":"

Priming semantic representations: An experimental approach to plurality<\/h3>\n

Mora Maldonado (Centre for Language Evolution, University of Edinburgh)<\/em><\/p>\n

Tuesday 25 September, 11:30-12:30<\/div>\n

G.32, 7 George Square<\/p>\n

\n

Sentences involving plural expressions can give rise to distributive and non-distributive interpretations (in (a) and (b) respectively):<\/p>\n

(1) The girls ate two cookies.
\n(a) The girls ate two cookies\u00a0each<\/i>.
\n(b) The girls ate two cookies\u00a0in total<\/i>.<\/p>\n

(2) The bags are light.
\n(a) The bags\u00a0together<\/i>\u00a0are light.
\n(b)\u00a0Each<\/i>\u00a0bag is individually light without the bags together being light.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

In formal semantics, the derivation of these readings has been traditionally accounted for by assuming that non-distributive readings are obtained by default (as soon as the plural subject is in the predicate denotation), whereas distributive readings arise through the insertion of a covert distributivity operator D, whose meaning roughly corresponds to that of the word\u00a0each<\/i>\u00a0in English (Link, 1987; Champollion, to appear). The D operator applies the VP to each atomic member of the plural subject.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

While the availability of distributive and non-distributive readings for sentences in (1) and (2) is undisputed, one could ask whether the abstract mechanisms proposed to derive the contrast are accessed as such during sentence comprehension. I will report the results of three studies showing that non-distributive and distributive interpretations can be independently primed for both sentences in (1) and (2). Priming serves here to complement introspection on truth-value and inferential judgments, revealing the abstract mechanisms underlying semantic interpretation. Our findings suggest that the compositional operations proposed to derive the non-distributive\/distributive contrast are at play during comprehension. The existence of distributive priming in absence of object covariation (e.g. 2) reveals an abstract representation of the non-distributive\/distributive distinction, which is orthogonal to specific verification strategies.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Priming semantic representations: An experimental approach to plurality Mora Maldonado (Centre for Language Evolution, University of Edinburgh) Tuesday 25 September, 11:30-12:30 G.32, 7 George Square Sentences involving plural expressions can give rise to distributive and non-distributive interpretations (in (a) and (b) respectively): (1) The girls ate two cookies. (a) The girls ate two cookies\u00a0each. (b) … Continue reading 25\u00a0September: Mora Maldonado<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3012"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3012\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3023,"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3012\/revisions\/3023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}