Yoad Winter (Technion and Utrecht University)
"Typicality Effects and the Logic of Reciprocity"
Friday, March 27th at 4pm
Silver Center, Room 705
Followed by a reception at 726 Broadway, 7th floor
Abstract:
Joint work with Nir Kerem and Naama Friedmann
This talk will introduce a significant revision of the Strongest
Meaning Hypothesis on reciprocal expressions like "each other" and
"one another" (Dalrymple et al 1998). A more powerful hypothesis
will be presented, connecting the logical semantics of reciprocals
to the meaning of everyday concepts in natural language.
The talk will report experimental results supporting the proposed
generalization.
We argue that the logical semantics of reciprocals are directly
derived by the *relational concept* within their scope: the
concept representing the meaning of the relational expression
combining with the reciprocal, e.g. a transitive verb.
We make new observations on typicality effects (cf. Osherson and
Smith 1997) with verbs, and extend the SMH into a new principle,
called the Maximal Typicality Hypothesis (MTH).
This principle respects meanings of verbs like "know", "pinch" or
"hug" better than Dalrymple et al's assumptions, and accounts for
their effect on the reciprocal meaning.
We report on experiments testing typicality with relational
concepts, and its correlation with the interpretation of reciprocal
sentences that refer to these concepts. The observed correlations
are unexpected by the SMH but systematically support the MTH.
Selected References
Dalrymple et al. 1998: "Reciprocal expressions and the concept of
reciprocity", L&P 21.
Osherson & Smith 1997: "On typicality and vagueness", Cognition 64.