Some Existential Interpretations: The Role of Pitch and Duration in the English Quantity Implicature
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Date
2021-12
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
The sentence "Some kids crossed the street." has varying interpretations depending on the speaker's pronunciation. It could mean "some, but not all, the kids crossed the street," or it could mean "some, and possibly all, the kids crossed the street." The first interpretation is thought to be based on an inference from the domain of cognition referred to as pragmatics. The second is thought to stem from truth-conditional semantics. My project seeks to examine the role that pitch and vowel duration play in the interpretation of these sentences with English-speaking adults. I also would like to determine whether executive function is predictive of the interpretation of the word 'some.'
In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, I have created a totally remote and novel experiment package that participants could complete at home on their own computers. Executive function was evaluated via an online survey. The actual experiment portion is a series of videos that feature four characters. Either some or all of the characters complete an action and then the narrator makes a statement, such as "Some kids crossed the street." There are four pronunciations of the quantifier 'some', which vary by pitch and duration, used in the experiment. The participant decides if the statement is accurate or inaccurate based on their interpretation of the situation and the sentence, and in this way shows us which type of interpretation they have of 'some' in the context presented.
The deleted-vowel 'sm' was far more often accepted in the 4 out of 4 context, which means that an implicature was not generated. Three other variants of some were also analyzed and the acceptances were not statistically different. Therefore, we conclude that 'sm' may be a distinct lexical item than the other variants and that vowel duration is the most important factor at play when deciding whether or not to generate an implicature. Also, inhibition and working memory were negatively correlated with acceptances in the 4 out of 4 context.
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Keywords
implicature, some, quantifier, English, phonetics