Every ambiguity isn’t syntactic in nature: Testing the Rational Speech Act model of scope ambiguity
- Sherry Yong Chen (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
- Bob van Tiel (Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour)
Abstract
Utterances like ‘Every guest didn’t leave’ are ambiguous between a reading according to which no guest left and a reading according to which not all of the guests left. This ambiguity is often explained by assuming that ‘every-not’ utterances have two different syntactic parses. However, experimental studies have shown that pragmatic factors, such as prior probabilities and the question under discussion, also play an important role in the interpretation of ambiguous ‘every-not’ utterances. Recently, Scontras and Pearl (2020) put forward a probabilistic model of ambiguity resolution that makes it possible to quantify the relative contribution of syntactic and pragmatic factors. Here, we present three experiments aimed at testing this model and measuring the division of labor between syntax and pragmatics. Our results suggest that variability in the interpretation of ‘every-not’ utterances can be explained almost entirely in terms of pragmatics, suggesting only a marginal role for syntax.
Keywords: RSA, scope ambiguity, pragmatics, QUD
How to Cite:
Chen, S. & van Tiel, B., (2021) “Every ambiguity isn’t syntactic in nature: Testing the Rational Speech Act model of scope ambiguity”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 4(1), 254-263. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/h3rp-m711
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