{"id":1436,"date":"2010-04-05T05:08:10","date_gmt":"2010-04-05T09:08:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=1436"},"modified":"2010-04-05T09:16:56","modified_gmt":"2010-04-05T13:16:56","slug":"lfrg-monday-45-scontras-graff-goodman-on-degrees-of-pluralities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2010\/04\/05\/lfrg-monday-45-scontras-graff-goodman-on-degrees-of-pluralities\/","title":{"rendered":"LFRG Monday 4\/5: Two CLS practice talks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><P>WHAT: Practice talks for CLS<BR><br clear='none'\/>\nWHEN: April 5th, Monday, 11.30AM - 1PM<BR><br clear='none'\/>\nWHERE: 32-D831<\/P><\/p>\n<p><P>Talk 1: Gregory Scontras (Harvard University), Peter Graff (MIT), and Noah Goodman (MIT)<BR><br clear='none'\/>\nTitle: Comparing Pluralities<\/P><\/p>\n<p><P>Talk 2: Luka Crnic<BR><br clear='none'\/>\nTitle: Imperatives in Unconditionals<\/P><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n<P><br clear='none'\/>\nSpeakers have reliable truth-judgments when comparing pluralities. The semantics of these constructions, however, cannot straightforwardly follow from the<br clear='none'\/>\nsemantics generally assumed for comparatives (e.g., von Stechow 1984, Heim 1985, Kennedy 1997) or plurals (e.g., Link 1983, Landman 1989, Schwarzschild 1996).<br clear='none'\/>\nPast work on plural comparison (Matushanksy and Ruys, 2006) attempts to capture speakers\u0092 intuitions in a semantics that reduces plural comparison to a<br clear='none'\/>\nmultitude of comparisons between the individual members of compared pluralities. We present experimental evidence that plural comparison does not reduce to the<br clear='none'\/>\ncomparison of degrees true of individual members, but rather to the comparison of collective degrees inferred from the pluralities involved.<\/P><\/p>\n<p><P>Our results support the hypothesis that a plurality can have a single degree associated with it that differs from the maximal degrees true of each of its parts,<br clear='none'\/>\nand that this degree is calculated by averaging the maximal degrees of the individuals belonging to the plurality. Thus, collective properties of pluralities<br clear='none'\/>\nare compared. Plural comparison then proceeds just as singular comparison, where the property relevant for comparison is inferred by averaging the degrees<br clear='none'\/>\nassociated with the individual members of each plurality. Translating differences between pluralities into a probabilistic truth value significantly improves<br clear='none'\/>\nthe model\u0092s fit to human data. Ongoing work investigates how the gradience in human judgments arises.<\/P><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>WHAT: Practice talks for CLS WHEN: April 5th, Monday, 11.30AM - 1PM WHERE: 32-D831 Talk 1: Gregory Scontras (Harvard University), Peter Graff (MIT), and Noah Goodman (MIT) Title: Comparing Pluralities Talk 2: Luka Crnic Title: Imperatives in Unconditionals Speakers have reliable truth-judgments when comparing pluralities. The semantics of these constructions, however, cannot straightforwardly follow from [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1436","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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1436"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1446,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1436\/revisions\/1446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}