American Sign Language famously disambiguates pronoun antecedents with the use of space. In ASL, both referential and quantificational NPs can be signed at different locations (‘loci’) in the signing space. Pronouns can later retrieve these NPs by pointing at the same locus. Many analyses of ASL pronouns assume that these spatial loci are the overt realization of formal variables (Lillo-Martin ...

The scalar particle mo in Japanese gives rise to ambiguity in negative contexts. In this paper we argue that the ambiguity cannot be accounted for as a scopal ambiguity, and propose a lexical ambiguity account. In particular, we observe that the distribution of the small reading of mo is limited to a subset of NPI licensing environments, and is sensitive to presuppositions, from which we conclu...

Consider the following choice problem, known as “Ellsberg’s three-color urn example”, or simply the “Ellsberg Paradox” (Ellsberg [7]). An urn contains 30 red balls, and 60 green and blue balls, in unspecified proportions; subjects are asked to compare (i) a bet on a red draw vs. a bet on a green draw, and (ii) a bet on a red or blue draw vs. a bet on a green or blue draw. If the subject wins a ...

Abstract We empirically show that sample information not only moderates prospects’ outcome ambiguity but also decision makers’ revealed aversion of them. Since most natural prospects permit at least some inference, accounting for their degree improves prediction aversion. The special case full ambiguity, as in Ellsberg-type designs, is typically averted—yet many makers systematically like low d...

In this article, we investigate ambiguity in syntactic annotation. The ambiguity in question is inherent in a way that even human annotators interpret the meaning differently. In our experiment, we detect potential structurally ambiguous sentences with Constraint Grammar rules. In the linguistic phenomena we investigate, structural ambiguity is primarily caused by word order. The potentially am...

A new approach to ambiguity of context-free grammars is presented, and within this approach the LL and LR techniques are generalized to solve the following problems for large classes of ambiguous grammars: |Construction of a parser that accepts all sentences generated by the grammar, and which always terminates in linear time. |Identiication of the structural ambiguity: a nite set of pairs of p...

Our investigation focuses on several types of structural ambiguity in European Portuguese. The materials include sentences with set-divider adverbs ambiguous as to the direction of syntactic attachment, adjunct and complement PPs ambiguous as to the level of syntactic embedding, nonrestrictive clauses with local and non-local possible antecedents, and relative clauses ambiguous as to their rest...

Studies monitoring eye-movements in scenes containing entities have provided robust evidence for incremental reference resolution processes. This paper addresses the less studied question of whether depicted event scenes can affect processes of incremental thematic role-assignment. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants inspected agent-action-patient events while listening to German verb-second s...