Language constructs as compatibility intervals: a small-scale experiment
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2020/11/0025/000440Keywords:
scales, vague constructs, meaning representations.Abstract
We conducted a small-scale experiment in which the respondents were asked to relate different language constructs (e.g. “possible”, “afterwards”, “seldom”) to numbers on a certain scale (e.g. surprisingness, time, frequency). We studied how the respondents expressed vagueness of the meaning using a numeric scale, examined how their answers related to scalar implicatures and questioned whether the meaning of vague constructs could be adequately modelled using compatibility intervals, a meaning representation (computational model) we recently proposed.
References
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Kapustin, P., Kapustin, M., 2019a. Modeling language constructs with compatibility intervals, in: Proceedings of the IWCS 2019 Workshop on Computing Semantics with Types, Frames and Related Structures. pp. 49–54.
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Zeevat, H., 2013. Expressing surprise by particles, in: Beyond Expressives: Explorations in Use-Conditional Meaning. Brill, pp. 297–320.
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