Papers by Alexis Wellwood
Experiments in Linguistic Meaning, Jan 27, 2023
On standard analyses, indicative conditionals (ICs) behave in a Boolean fashion when interacting ... more On standard analyses, indicative conditionals (ICs) behave in a Boolean fashion when interacting with and and or. We test this prediction by investigating probability judgments about sentences of the form ⌜a → b { and/or } c → d⌝. Our findings are incompatible with a Boolean picture. This is challenging for standard analyses of ICs, as well as for several nonclassical analyses. Some trivalent theories, conversely, may account for the data.
Interactions of Degree and Quantification, 2020
Journal of Semantics, Dec 11, 2011
This squib investigates parallels between nominal and verbal comparatives. Building on key insigh... more This squib investigates parallels between nominal and verbal comparatives. Building on key insights of Hackl (2000) and Bale & Barner (2009), we show that more behaves uniformly when it combines with nominal and verbal predicates: (i) it cannot combine with singular count NPs or perfective telic VPs; (ii) grammatical properties of the predicates determine the scale of comparison-plural marked NPs and habitual VPs are compared on a scale of cardinality, whereas mass NPs and perfective (atelic) VPs are (often) compared along non-cardinal, though monotonic, scales. Taken together, our findings confirm and strengthen parallels that have independently been drawn between the nominal and verbal domains. In addition, our discussion and data, drawn from English, Spanish, and Bulgarian, suggest that the semantic contribution of more can be given a uniform analysis.
Cognitive Science
What is the structure of thought?" is as central a question as any in cognitive science. A classi... more What is the structure of thought?" is as central a question as any in cognitive science. A classic answer to this question has appealed to a Language of Thought (LoT). We point to emerging research from disparate branches of the field that supports the LoT hypothesis, but also uncovers diversity in LoTs across cognitive systems, stages of development, and species. Our letter formulates open research
Semantics and Linguistic Theory
I ask what a small set of modification data requires of clausal event semantics. Classic Davidson... more I ask what a small set of modification data requires of clausal event semantics. Classic Davidsonian semantics posits that modifiers like "in the hallway" express properties of events, and expects that iterations of such modifiers will simply contribute additional conjuncts at logical form. The data I consider challenges this view, and others cast in the Davidsonian spirit, at least so long as we hope to preserve an important and plausible semantic principle, Role Exhaustion (Williams 2015). As I show, preserving the principle and accounting for the facts can be accomplished by adopting two independently-motivated sets of claims: first, that verbs introduce existential closure over their event argument, and modifiers take verb meanings as semantic arguments (Champollion 2015); second, that simple clauses have two layers of event description, "framing" and "framed" (Schein 2016). In the end, I sketch two possible extensions of the approach, towards the i...
The Meaning of More
The preceding chapters of the book focused on the traditional sorts of data motivating formal sem... more The preceding chapters of the book focused on the traditional sorts of data motivating formal semantic treatments of comparatives: productive patterns of inference, judgments of truth/falsity in context, etc. In this concluding chapter, the book connects the formal analysis with recent work in language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science more broadly. Considering a number of observations in linguistics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive development, the chapter considers how the formal theory can (or cannot) be leveraged in order to predict or explain such observations. The chapter argues that, even given the same foundational assumptions about how the formal theory relates to conceptualization, the uniform compositional theory of comparatives offered in the book provides the tools for better explanations of such data than its competitors. In the end, the chapter considers the prospects for resolving the indeterminacy of MUCH in terms of a domain-general concept ...
The Meaning of More
While much of the tradition in degree semantics has focused on the distribution and interpretatio... more While much of the tradition in degree semantics has focused on the distribution and interpretation of comparatives targeting adjectives, this chapter discusses a class of adjectival comparatives that appears to have gone unnoticed. That is, traditional accounts focus on the interpretation of phrases like “more patient”, while the present chapter considers how such phrases differ from minimally different targets like “patient more”. Probing the meaning of the latter sort of case, this chapter suggests an analysis in which they are interpreted rather like plural verbal comparatives—i.e., as comparisons between numbers of events. This proposal includes a novel approach to the distinction between stage-level and individual-level adjectival predications, such that the former allows for its (base) stative property to be mapped to a plurality of discrete (i.e., maximal and non-overlapping) occasions during which the relevant state(s) hold.
The Meaning of More
The previous chapters have focused on the compositional semantics of comparatives targeting phras... more The previous chapters have focused on the compositional semantics of comparatives targeting phrases relatively uninfluenced by the interpretive effects of functional morphology. This chapter focuses on comparatives that obligatorily interpreted as comparisons between numbers of things, and ties such an interpretation to the presence of plural-marking (explicitly in “chairs”, implicitly in “jump (up and down)”). Assuming that plural-marking broadly signals non-trivial ordering relations between pluralities, the chapter proposes that the restriction to number-based comparison in such cases is due to a stronger constraint on the selection of measure functions (i.e., invariance under automorphism) than has previously been supposed. This analysis involves rejecting the assumption that “many” in English pronounces a distinct lexical primitive from MUCH, and adduces independent evidence in support of this rejection.
... (36) * John John znajet knows Marynyh Mary.Gen bol'she more druzej friends 'John kn... more ... (36) * John John znajet knows Marynyh Mary.Gen bol'she more druzej friends 'John knows Mary's most friends' ... “Only languages without articles may allow LB extraction” (one-way implication; * is irrelevant) (40) * dami expensive se he oi that gari-úa car-cl dekhlo saw ...
We explore how formal differences in the meanings of the quantifiers more and most influence how ... more We explore how formal differences in the meanings of the quantifiers more and most influence how they are evaluated even in cases where they are truthconditionally equivalent. This influence makes sense as, on our view, meanings can act as a kind of “mental zoom lens”, directing perception and attention for the evaluation of sentences in different ways. In our case study, we consider the linguistic properties of more and most in tandem with the psychophysical properties of different modes of numerical estimation and visual set selection in order to show how this process may be measured. We discuss preliminary results from an ongoing study with preschoolers. Our results suggest that, from the very onset of acquisition, meanings must be understood as strictly richer than format-neutral truth conditions, and that learning language at this level importantly involves hooking up linguistic forms with extralinguistic cognition.
Determining the semantic content of sentences, and uncovering regularities between linguistic for... more Determining the semantic content of sentences, and uncovering regularities between linguistic form and meaning, requires attending to both morphological and syntactic properties of a language with an eye to the notional categories that the various pieces of form express. In this dissertation, I investigate the morphosyntactic devices that English speakers (and speakers of other languages) can use to talk about comparisons between things: comparative sentences with, in English, "more... than", "as... as", "too", "enough", and others. I argue that a core component of all of these constructions is a unitary element expressing the concept of measurement. The theory that I develop departs from the standard degree-theoretic analysis of the semantics of comparatives in three crucial respects: first, gradable adjectives do not (partially or wholly) denote measure functions; second, degrees are introduced compositionally; and three, the introduction of...
interpreted modal auxiliaries. Tancredi (2007) and Huitink (2008) observed that von Fintel and Ia... more interpreted modal auxiliaries. Tancredi (2007) and Huitink (2008) observed that von Fintel and Iatridou’s proposed constraint, the Epistemic Containment Principle (ECP), does not apply uniformly: it does not apply to strong quantifiers headed by each. We consider the ECP effect in light of the differential behavior of each and every in the environment of wh-, negative, and generic operators as described by Beghelli and Stowell (1997). Assuming that epistemic and root modals merge at two different syntactic heights (e.g. Cinque 1999) and that modals may act as unselective binders (Heim 1982), we extend Beghelli and Stowell’s topological approach to quantifier scope interactions in order to formulate a novel syntactic account of the ECP.
This squib investigates parallels between nominal and verbal comparatives. Building on key insigh... more This squib investigates parallels between nominal and verbal comparatives. Building on key insights of Hackl
ABSTRACT: Questions about the nature of the relationship be-tween language and extralinguistic co... more ABSTRACT: Questions about the nature of the relationship be-tween language and extralinguistic cognition are old, but only re-cently has a new view emerged that allows for the systematic in-vestigation of claims about linguistic structure, based on how it is understood or utilized outside of the language system. Our paper represents a case study for this interaction in the domain of event semantics. We adopt a transparency thesis about the relationship between linguistic structure and extralinguistic cognition, inves-tigating whether different lexico-syntactic structures can differ-entially recruit the visual causal percept. A prominent analysis of causative verbs likemove suggests reference to two distinct events and a causal relationship between them, whereas non-causative verbs like push do not so refer. In our study, we present English speakers with simple scenes that either do or do not support the perception of a causal link, and manipulate (between subjects) a one-sentence in...
Acquiring the correct meanings of number words (e.g., seven, forty-two) is challenging, as such w... more Acquiring the correct meanings of number words (e.g., seven, forty-two) is challenging, as such words fail to describe salient properties of individuals or objects in their environment, re-ferring rather to properties of sets of such objects or individu-als. Understanding how children succeed in this task requires a precise understanding not only of the kinds of data children have available to them, but also of the character of the biases and expectations that they bring to the learning task. Previous research has revealed a critical role for language itself in how children acquire number word meanings, however attempts to pinpoint precisely the strong linguistic cues has proved chal-lenging. We propose a novel “syntactic bootstrapping ” hy-pothesis in which categorizing a novel word as a determiner leads to quantity-based interpretations. The results of a word learning task with 4 year olds indicates that this hypothesis is on the right track.
The question of whether epistemic modals contribute to the truth conditions of the sentences they... more The question of whether epistemic modals contribute to the truth conditions of the sentences they appear in is a matter of active debate in the literature. Fueling this debate is the lack of consensus about the extent to which epistemics can appear in the scope of other operators. This corpus study investigates the distribution of epistemics in naturalistic data. Our results indicate that they do embed, supporting the view that they contribute semantic content. However, their distribution is limited, compared to that of other modals. This limited distribution seems to call for a nuanced account: while epistemics are semantically contentful, they may require special licensing conditions.
It is standardly assumed that a close relationship holds between (i) the learnability of language... more It is standardly assumed that a close relationship holds between (i) the learnability of languages with some property P, and (ii) the existence of languages with property P as revealed by typological studies. If it is not possible for a human to acquire a language with P, then clearly no speakers will be found of any language with P.
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Papers by Alexis Wellwood