This paper presents two experimental findings pertaining to the semantics and pragmatics of superlative modifiers (at least, at most). First, in a scenario with N objects of a given type, speakers consistently judge it true that there are ‘at least N’ and ‘at most N’ objects of that type. This supports the debated position that the ignorance conveyed by superlative modifiers is an implicature, ...

We discuss sincere voting when voters have cardinal preferences over alternatives. We interpret sincerity as opposed to strategic voting, and thus de…ne sincerity as the optimal behavior when conditions to vote strategically diminish. When voting mechanisms allow for only one message type (simple voting mechanisms) we show that eliminating some conditions for strategic voting, individuals’ opti...

Sincerity is important in everyday human communication and perception of genuineness can greatly affect emotions and outcomes in social interactions. In this paper, submitted for the INTERSPEECH 2016 Sincerity Challenge, we examine a corpus of six different types of apologetic utterances from a variety of English speakers articulated in different prosodic styles, and we rate the sincerity of ea...