Recent arguments for relativist semantic theories have centered on the phenomenon of “faultless disagreement.” This paper offers independent motivation for such theories, based on the interpretation of predicates of personal taste in certain attitude contexts and presuppositional constructions. It is argued that the correct interpretation falls out naturally from a relativist theory, but requir...

Previous experiments have demonstrated the impact of speech prosody on syntactic processing. The present study was designed to examine how listeners use specific acoustic properties of prosody for grammatical interpretation. We investigated the independent contributions of two acoustic properties associated with the pitch and rhythmic properties of speech; the fundamental frequency and temporal...

I present sound and complete natural deduction systems for (quantified modal) imperative logic, in five steps. (1) Syntax: I introduce imperative formal languages by using the imperative operator ‘!’; e.g., if ‘A’ is a declarative sentence, ‘!A’ (“let A be true’’) is an imperative sentence. (2) Semantics: I introduce interpretations of imperative formal languages, and (building on previous work...

This study investigated processing effort by measuring peoples' pupil diameter as they listened to sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity. In the first experiment, we manipulated prosody. The results showed that when prosodic structure conflicted with syntactic structure, pupil diameter reliably increased. In the second experiment, we manipulated both prosody and visual context. T...

The degree to which native and non-native readers interpret English sentences incrementally was investigated by examining plausibility effects on reanalysis processes. Experiment 1 required participants to read sentences word by word and to make on-line plausibility judgements. The results showed that natives and non-natives immediately computed the plausibility of the preferred structural anal...

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 P. Larrivée and C. Lee (eds.), Negation and Polarity: Experimental Perspectives, Language, Cognition, and Mind 1, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-17464-8_7 Abstract This study focuses on the interaction between prosody and syntax in the interpretation of single negation and Double Negation in two Negative Concord languages, namely Catalan and Spanish. ...

There is no dispute that the comprehension of spoken language involves the use of different types of linguistic information-syntactic, semantic, lexical, prosodic. What is less clear is when and how these different types of information are used in the comprehension process. In this paper we focus on prosodic information, and ask whether it is used to constrain the immediate structural interpret...

: This study aims to explore the relationship between syntactic and lexical complexity and also the relationship between different aspects of lexical complexity. To this end, speech monologs of 35 Iranian high-intermediate learners of English on three different tasks (i.e. argumentation, description, and narration) were analyzed for correlations between one measure of sy...

In this paper we shall explore the phenomenon of double negation (DN) in a negative concord language like Catalan from an inferential perspective. According to recent developments within the generative approach to the theory of sentential grammar, a proper account of this phenomenon requires an analysis of the lexical, syntactic, and semantic conditions involved. Yet this model only attempts to...

Why should computers interpret language incremen-tally? In recent years psycholinguistic evidence for in-cremental interpretation has become more and more compelling, suggesting that humans perform semantic interpretation before constituent boundaries, possibly word by word. However, possible computational applications have received less attention. In this paper we consider various potential ap...