***Q&A sessions:***
We will organize two half-hour synchronous Q&A sessions via Zoom. These will take place on Friday September 4 at 10h30 and 18h (London time). Here are the Zoom details for both meetings:
Topic: SuB - Q&A - Denic & Szymanik
Join Zoom Meeting
https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/93383021009
Meeting ID: 933 8302 1009
***Abstract:***
Quantifying determiners 'most' and 'more than half' are standardly assumed
to have the same truth-conditional meaning. There is however empirical
evidence that 'most' is sometimes interpreted as 'significantly more than
half' (Ariel, 2003, 2004; Solt, 2016; Ramotowska et al., 2020). We examine
two hypotheses about what might be the source of different interpretations
of 'most' and 'more than half'. The first is that, contrary to standard
assumptions, these two quantifiers in fact differ in their
truth-conditional meaning. The second is that 'most' but not 'more than
half' lends itself to a pragmatic strengthening mechanism. These two
hypotheses make diverging predictions for how 'most' is interpreted in
downward-monotonic environments. We report the results of an experiment
which tested these predictions, and argue that our results support
the first hypothesis.