{"id":11989,"date":"2019-03-18T05:58:30","date_gmt":"2019-03-18T09:58:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=11989"},"modified":"2019-03-17T15:38:14","modified_gmt":"2019-03-17T19:38:14","slug":"essl-lab-meeting-3-22-helena-aparicio-mit-bcs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2019\/03\/18\/essl-lab-meeting-3-22-helena-aparicio-mit-bcs\/","title":{"rendered":"ESSL Lab Meeting 3\/22 - Helena Aparicio (MIT BCS)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Title: <\/strong>How to find the rabbit in the big(ger) box:<br>Reasoning about contextual parameters for gradable adjectives under embedding (joint work with Roger Levy (MIT BCS) and Elizabeth Coppock (Boston University))<br><strong>Speaker: <\/strong>Helena Aparicio (MIT BCS)<br><strong>Time:<\/strong> Friday, 22nd of March 2-3pm<br><strong>Abstract:<\/strong>Haddock  (1987) noticed that the definite description \u0091the rabbit in the hat\u0092  succeeds in referring even in the presence of multiple hats, so long as  only one hat contains a rabbit. These complex definites suggest that  uniqueness with respect to the NP hat is not required in such embedded  contexts, raising the question of what the correct formulation of the  uniqueness condition for definite determines is. Generally speaking, two  types of solutions have been proposed to this puzzle. The first one  postulates a complex semantic representation for definite determiners,  where uniqueness can be checked at different points of the semantic  representation for either sets of hats or sets of rabbit-containing hats  (Bumford 2017). The second type of account proposes that definite  descriptions can be evaluated against a sub-portion of the maximally  available context (Evans 2005; Frazier 2008; Muhlstein 2015). This  pragmatic mechanism ensures that reference resolution is successful,  even when the maximal context would violate the uniqueness  presupposition of the definite article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The present work seeks to  tease apart these two classes of theories by investigating the  interpretive preferences for similarly embedded noun phrases containing a  positive or comparative adjective (e.g., \u0091the rabbit in the big\/ger  box\u0092). Experimental results show that embedded positive adjectives exhibit a sensitivity to contextual manipulations that embedded  comparatives lack. We derive this sensitivity using a probabilistic  computational model of the contextual parameters guiding the  interpretation of the embedded NP, and compare it to alternative models  that vary in the lexical representations assumed for definite  determiners. Our simulation results show that neither of the two  proposals under consideration can independently account for all of the  observed experimental results. We show that the model that best matches  human data is one that combines both a complex uniqueness check (\u00e0 la Bumford) with pragmatic context coordination.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Title: How to find the rabbit in the big(ger) box:Reasoning about contextual parameters for gradable adjectives under embedding (joint work with Roger Levy (MIT BCS) and Elizabeth Coppock (Boston University))Speaker: Helena Aparicio (MIT BCS)Time: Friday, 22nd of March 2-3pmAbstract:Haddock (1987) noticed that the definite description \u0091the rabbit in the hat\u0092 succeeds in referring even in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11989"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11990,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11989\/revisions\/11990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}