TY  - JOUR
A1  - Schreiber, Alexander
A1  - Onea Gáspár, Edgar
T1  - Are narrow focus exhaustivity inferences Bayesian inferences?
JF  - Frontiers in psychology / Frontiers Research Foundation
N2  - In successful communication, the literal meaning of linguistic utterances is often enriched by pragmatic inferences. Part of the pragmatic reasoning underlying such inferences has been successfully modeled as Bayesian goal recognition in the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework. In this paper, we try to model the interpretation of question-answer sequences with narrow focus in the answer in the RSA framework, thereby exploring the effects of domain size and prior probabilities on interpretation. Should narrow focus exhaustivity inferences be actually based on Bayesian inference involving prior probabilities of states, RSA models should predict a dependency of exhaustivity on these factors. We present experimental data that suggest that interlocutors do not act according to the predictions of the RSA model and that exhaustivity is in fact approximately constant across different domain sizes and priors. The results constitute a conceptual challenge for Bayesian accounts of the underlying pragmatic inferences.
KW  - pragmatics
KW  - Bayesian models
KW  - rational speech act models
KW  - implicatures
KW  - focus
KW  - exhaustivity
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.677223
SN  - 1664-1078
VL  - 12
PB  - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY  - Lausanne
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Alxatib, Sam
A1  - Sauerland, Ulrich
T1  - Vagueness
JF  - The Oxford Handbook of Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics
N2  - Though vague phenomena have been studied extensively for many decades, it is only in recent years that researchers sought the support of quantitative data. This chapter highlights and discusses the insights that experimental methods brought to the study of vagueness. One area focused on are ‘borderline contradictions’, that is, sentences like ‘She is neither tall nor not tall’ that are contradictory when analysed in classical logic, but are actually acceptable as descriptions of borderline cases. The flourishing of theories and experimental studies that borderline contradictions have led to are examined closely. Beyond this illustrative case, an overview of recent studies that concern the classification of types of vagueness, the use of numbers, rounding, number modification, and the general pragmatic status of vagueness is provided.
KW  - vagueness
KW  - gradability
KW  - categories
KW  - borderline cases
KW  - contradiction
KW  - valency
KW  - imprecision
KW  - hysteresis
KW  - pragmatics
KW  - semantics
Y1  - 2019
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198791768.013.24
PB  - Oxford University Press
CY  - Oxford
ER  -