Speaker: Manuel Kriz (Vienna/Harvard)
Title: Finding truth-value gaps
Date/Time: Thursday, Apr 10, 5:30-7p
Location: 32-D831
A sentence with a definite plural like (1) has
non-complementary truth- and falsity conditions. It is clearly true if
John read all of the books, and clearly false if he read none, but if he
read exactly half of them, it seems to be neither true nor false.(1) John read the books.
We develop an experimental method for detecting such a truth-value gap
and apply it to sentences where the definite plural is embedded in the
scope of a quantifier (as in (2)) to ground empirically recent
theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of homogeneity in plural
predication.(2) Every student read the books.
The paradigm we develop is promising also for the study of and
comparison between other phenomena, including presuppositions,
vagueness, and scalar implicatures.