The department of linguistics invites you to Dr. Andrew Nevins' (UCL) talk as part of the Department of Linguistics Colloquia Series. Title and abstract below. The event will be remotely held from 4:00-6:00pm on Friday October 16th.
Title: Expressions of Paucity: Where is the Upper Bound (joint work with Dr. Paul Marty (UCL))
Abstract:
We investigate into the semantics and pragmatics of the expression of paucity a couple in English addressing by experimental means the following two questions: what is the upper bound of a couple and where does this upper bound come from? Experiment 1 establishes that a couple has a lower-bound meaning of ‘at least two’ akin to the lower-bound meaning of the bare numeral ‘two’, with no semantically effective upper bound. Experiment 2 provides evidence that only a couple patterns distinctly from only two, in that the latter sharply degrades after three. We contend that this is because a couple has different pragmatic competitors than two; while the two are quite similar semantically, the former pragmatically competes with expressions of abundance and is context- dependent, whereas the latter competes with numerals. Finally, Experiment 3 looks at the computation of implicature-based competition during a working-memory task, and finds no effect of an upper bound imposed on a couple, unlike other scalar items in the task. We discuss how similar typological and methodological conclusions may potentially be extended to languages with inflectional paucals.
For video link information please contact Robin Jenkins.
For more information, contact: Robin Jenkins at robin.jenkins@uconn.edu