Judith Degen

Reasoning in Reference Games: Individual- vs. Population-Level Probabilistic Modeling

Recent advances in probabilistic pragmatics have achieved considerable success in modeling speakers’ and listeners’ pragmatic reasoning as probabilistic inference. However, these models are usually applied to population-level data, and so implicitly suggest a homogeneous population without individual differences. Here we investigate potential individual differences in Theory-of-Mind related depth of pragmatic reasoning in so-called reference games that require drawing ad hoc Quantity implicatures of varying complexity. We show by Bayesian model comparison that a model that assumes a heterogenous population is a better predictor of our data, especially for comprehension. We discuss the implications for the treatment of individual differences in probabilistic models of language use.

Subjectivity Predicts Adjective Ordering Preferences

From English to Hungarian to Mokilese, speakers exhibit strong ordering preferences in multi-adjective strings: “the big blue box” sounds far more natural than “the blue big box.” We show that an adjective’s distance from the modified noun is predicted not by a rigid syntax, but by the adjective’s meaning: less subjective adjectives occur closer to the nouns they modify. This finding provides an example of a broad linguistic universal—adjective ordering preferences—emerging from general properties of cognition.

How Projective is Projective Content? Gradience in Projectivity and At-issueness

Projective content is utterance content that a speaker may be taken to be committed to even when the expression associated with the content occurs embedded under an entailment-canceling operator (e.g., Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet 1990). It has long been observed that projective content varies in how projective it is (e.g., Karttunen 1971; Simons 2001; Abusch 2010), though preliminary experimental research has been able to confirm only some of the intuitions about projection variability (e.g., Smith and Hall 2011; Xue and Onea 2011). Given the sparse empirical evidence for projection variability, the first goal of this paper was to investigate projection variability for projective content associated with 19 expressions of American English. The second goal was to explore the hypothesis, called the Gradient Projection Principle, that content projects to the extent that it is not at-issue. The findings of two pairs of experiments provide robust empirical evidence for projection variability and for the Gradient Projection Principle. We show that many analyses of projection cannot account for the observed projection variability and discuss the implications of our finding that projective content varies in its atissueness for an empirically adequate analysis of projection.