Critical typicality: truth judgements and compositionality with plurals and other gradable concepts

Abstract

Compositional semantic frameworks often compute the extension of a complex expression directly from the extensions of its parts. However, much work in cognitive psychology has shown important challenges for compositional methods. For instance, Hampton (J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cognit 14(1):12–32, 1988b) showed that speakers may let the complex nominal sports that are games include chess as one of its instances, without admitting chess in the extension of sports. Similarly, Lee (2017) experimentally supports the common intuition that instances of red hair are not necessarily categorized as red. This paper reviews further results about plural quantifiers, showing similar challenges for compositionality . It is proposed that typicality effects play a systematic role in compositional interpretation and the determination of truth-values . For instance, the “overextension” effect in the red hair example is predicted by the fact that focal red is an atypical hair color. Similarly, in the plural sentence the men are walking and writing, the availability of the split reading (“some men are walking and some men are writing”) increases due to the atypicality of doing both activities at the same time (Poortman, 2017). Further, in reciprocal sentences like the three men are pinching each other, the number of pinching acts may be three. This is related to the atypicality of situations where every man pinches two other men at the same time, as required by a strong interpretation of each other. The paper gives a uniform account of truth-value judgements on these different constructions, based on the identification of conflicts between typical preferences.