Nicole Gotzner
Biographic Data
| ID | 455235 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nicole Gotzner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nicole |
| FAMILY NAME | Gotzner |
| SIGNATURE | GOTZNER N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Osnabrück University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9584-4518 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 20 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Does It Matter What Is Said and Who Said It? The Interpretation of Trump’s and Harris’ Statements Among Republican and Democrat Voters
The Gricean model of communication assumes that cooperation is a precondition for successful communication but humans often use language non-cooperatively. How do language users calibrate cooperation when deciphering communicated content? The current work probes how belief alignment shapes the interpretation of underinformative statements attributed to politicians (Donald Trump or Kamala Harris) presented to self-identified Republican and Democra…
Reasoning with epistemic adverbs in child Romanian: Insights from the Shadow Play Paradigm
Our study experimentally investigates the comprehension of epistemic adverbs (poate ‘maybe’, sigur ‘certainly’) in child Romanian, an important undertaking as previous experimental acquisition studies have focused on epistemic modal verbs, and rarely on Romanian. Children were found to be non-adult-like in comprehending epistemic modal verbs, but this could be due to struggles with modal verb meaning rather than due to failure with epistemic reas…
Scalar alternative activation for implicature processing: A Lexical Decision Study With Antonyms and Negation
Scalar words such as warm may give rise to inferences such as warm but not hot. Under standard accounts, such scalar implicatures are derived by negating stronger alternatives. In processing, weaker scale-mates ( warm ) prime stronger ones ( hot ), suggesting that the latter are used in implicature processing (De Carvalho et al., 2016. Frontiers in Psychology , 7, 1500; Ronai & Xiang, 2023. Experiments in Linguistic Meaning , 2, 229–240). We test…
The Interpretation of Relative and Absolute Adjectives Under Negation
Negation typically has a contradictory effect on interpretation. At the same time, negated statements are often underinformative, which leaves room for pragmatic effects such as negative strengthening, where negated adjectives are pragmatically strengthened to convey their antonym (e.g., not large $\leadsto $ ‘small’). Here, we investigate a theoretical controversy relating to the mechanism deriving negative strengthening effects. According to Ho…
Negative strengthening: The interplay of evaluative polarity and scale structure
This work investigates absolute adjectives in the not very construction and how their pragmatic interpretation depends on the evaluative polarity and the scale structure of their antonymic pairs. Our experimental study reveals that evaluatively positive adjectives (clean) are more likely to be strengthened than evaluatively negative ones (dirty), and that maximum standard adjectives (clean or closed) are more likely to be strengthened than minimu…
On the Role of Loopholes in Polite Communication: Linking Subjectivity and Pragmatic Inference
Existing proposals on the attenuating uses of indirect, negated expressions (e.g., not happy to mean sad) agree that speakers exploit indirectness for pragmatic purposes but differ on the underlying sources they attribute to these uses. Here, we synthesize existing proposals via adjective subjectivity, which operationalizes the notion of loopholes for plausible deniability. We present experimental evidence that the degree of subjectivity of an ad…
Gradable adjective interpretation under negation: The role of competition
Gradable adjectives have recently drawn a lot of attention in experimental semantics/pragmatics regarding the different interpretations they trigger depending on scale structure, polarity, extremeness, and presence of negation (e.g., Gotzner et al. 2018b; a; Leffel et al. 2019). The current study investigates the interpretation of relative and absolute gradable adjectives in the scope of negation (e.g., not large and not clean, respectively) capi…
A closer look at the sources of variability in scalar implicature derivation: A review
For more than 20 years, studies in experimental pragmatics have provided invaluable insights into the cognitive processes involved in deriving scalar implicatures and achieving inferential comprehension. However, the reports have always contained a notable degree of variability that remained inadequately discussed in the literature. For instance, upon closer inspection of the experimental record, one can always find a group of individuals who ten…
Measurements, Numerals and Scales: Essays in Honour of Stephanie Solt
The polarity asymmetry of negative strengthening: Dissociating adjectival polarity from facethreatening potential
The interpretation of negated antonyms is characterised by a polarity asymmetry: the negation of a positive polarity antonym (X is not interesting) is more likely to be strengthened to convey its opposite (‘X is uninteresting’) than the negation of a negative polarity antonym (X is not uninteresting to convey that ‘X is interesting’) is. A classical explanation of this asymmetry relies on face-management. Since the predication of a negative polar…
Embedded implicature: What can be left unsaid
Previous research on scalar implicature has primarily relied on meta-linguistic judgment tasks and found varying rates of such inferences depending on the nature of the task and contextual manipulations. This paper introduces a novel interactive paradigm involving both a production and a comprehension side and a precise conversational goal. The main research question is what is reliably communicated by some in this communicative setting, both whe…
Meaning and Alternatives
Alternatives and competition in language are pervasive at all levels of linguistic analysis. More specifically, alternatives have been argued to play a prominent role in an ever-growing class of phenomena in the investigation of natural language meaning. In this article, we focus on scalar implicatures, as they are arguably the most paradigmatic case of an alternative-based phenomenon. We first review the main challenge for theories of alternativ…
Disjunction Triggers Exhaustivity Implicatures in 4- to 5-Year-Olds: Investigating the Role of Access to Alternatives
Children’s difficulty deriving scalar implicatures has been attributed to a variety of factors including processing limitations, an inability to access scalar alternatives, and pragmatic tolerance. The present research explores the nature of children’s difficulty by investigating a previously unexplored kind of inference—an exhaustivity implicature that is triggered by disjunction. We reasoned that if children are able to draw quantity implicatur…
The role of non-categorical relations in establishing focus alternative sets
Categorisation is arguably the most important organising principle in semantic memory. However, elements that are not in a categorical relation can be dynamically grouped together when the context provides a common theme for these elements. In the field of sentence (and discourse) comprehension, alternatives to a focused element can be thought of as a set of elements determined by a theme given in the utterance context. According to Alternative S…
Choice and prohibition in non-monotonic contexts
Disjunctions in the scope of possibility modals give rise to a conjunctive inference, generally referred to as 'free choice.' For example,Emma can take Spanish or Calculussuggests that Emma can take Spanish and can take Calculus. This inference is not valid on standard semantics for modals in combination with a Boolean semantics for disjunction. Hence free choice has sparked a whole industry of theories in philosophy of language and semantics. Th…
Vagueness in Implicature: The Case of Modified Adjectives
We show that the interpretation of sentences like John is not very Adj depends on whether Adj is vague. We argue that this follows from a constraint on the interaction between vagueness and conversational implicature, a domain that has not been studied extensively. The constraint states that implicatures are not drawn if they lead to “borderline contradictions” (see Ripley 2011; Alxatib & Pelletier 2011; a.o.), a natural extension of the idea tha…
The life and times of focus alternatives: Tracing the activation of alternatives to a focused constituent in language comprehension
The function of focus is to activate a set of alternatives, providing the locus for focus-sensitive particles likeonly. In the past decade, psycholinguistic research has shown that listeners entertain a set of alternatives in online language comprehension, similar to the algorithm stipulated by Alternative Semantics. The purpose of the present review is to gain a comprehensive picture of the role of focus alternatives in utterance comprehension a…
The role of focus intonation in implicature computation: A Comparison With Only and Also
The function of focus is to activate alternatives, and these activated alternatives are used to compute the corresponding inferences of an utterance. The experimental research reported here investigates the role of focus intonation in inference computation and its interplay with the overt focus particles only and also. In particular, I compare the mechanisms underlying the computation of exhaustivity implicatures, assertions, and additive presupp…
The Scalar Inferences of Strong Scalar Terms under Negative Quantifiers and Constraints on the Theory of Alternatives
Chemla & Spector (2011) have found experimental evidence that a universal sentence embedding a weak scalar term like Every student read some of the books has the strong inference that no student read all of the books, in addition to the weak one that not every student did (see also Clifton Jr & Dube 2010, Potts et al. 2015, Gotzner & Benz 2017, forthcoming). While it is controversial how this strong inference should be derived, there is consensus…
Scalar diversity and negative strengthening
In recent years, experimental research has demontrated great variability in the ratesof scalar inferences across different triggering expressions (Doran et al. 2009, 2012, van Tielet al. 2016). These studies have been taken as evidence against the so-called uniformity assumption,which posits that scalar implicature is triggered by a single mechanism and that thebehaviour of one scale should generalize to the whole family of scales. In the followi…
Embedded implicature in a new interactive paradigm
Previous research on scalar implicature has primarily relied on metalinguistic judgmenttasks and found varying rates of such inferences depending on the nature of the task andcontextual manipulations. This paper introduces a novel interactive paradigm involving both aproduction and a comprehension component, thereby fixing a precise conversational context.The main research question is what is reliably communicated by some in this communicativeset…
Role of Contrastive and Noncontrastive Associates in the Interpretation of Focus Particles
The present research examines the mechanisms underlying the comprehension of focus alternatives. In particular, we investigate whether listeners determine alternatives based on general semantic priming mechanisms or whether they only consider contrastive alternatives, elements that can replace the expression in focus. In a probe recognition experiment, we compare the retrieval of contrastive alternatives with that of general associates of a focus…
Intonation and Pragmatic Enrichment: How Intonation Constrains Ad Hoc Scalar Inferences
Pragmatic inferences require listeners to use alternatives to arrive at the speaker’s intended meaning. Previous research has shown that intonation interacts with alternatives but not how it does so. We present two mouse tracking experiments that test how pitch accents affect the processing of ad hoc scalar implicatures in English. The first shows that L+H* accents facilitate implicatures relative to H* accents. The second replicates this finding…
Alternative Sets in Language Processing: How Focus Alternatives are Represented in the Mind
The life and times of focus alternatives: Tracing the activation of alternatives to a focused constituent in language comprehension
The function of focus is to activate a set of alternatives, providing the locus for focus-sensitive particles likeonly. In the past decade, psycholinguistic research has shown that listeners entertain a set of alternatives in online language comprehension, similar to the algorithm stipulated by Alternative Semantics. The purpose of the present review is to gain a comprehensive picture of the role of focus alternatives in utterance comprehension a…
Alternative Sets in Language Processing: How Focus Alternatives are Represented in the Mind
Meaning and Alternatives
Alternatives and competition in language are pervasive at all levels of linguistic analysis. More specifically, alternatives have been argued to play a prominent role in an ever-growing class of phenomena in the investigation of natural language meaning. In this article, we focus on scalar implicatures, as they are arguably the most paradigmatic case of an alternative-based phenomenon. We first review the main challenge for theories of alternativ…
Role of Contrastive and Noncontrastive Associates in the Interpretation of Focus Particles
The present research examines the mechanisms underlying the comprehension of focus alternatives. In particular, we investigate whether listeners determine alternatives based on general semantic priming mechanisms or whether they only consider contrastive alternatives, elements that can replace the expression in focus. In a probe recognition experiment, we compare the retrieval of contrastive alternatives with that of general associates of a focus…
Intonation and Pragmatic Enrichment: How Intonation Constrains Ad Hoc Scalar Inferences
Pragmatic inferences require listeners to use alternatives to arrive at the speaker’s intended meaning. Previous research has shown that intonation interacts with alternatives but not how it does so. We present two mouse tracking experiments that test how pitch accents affect the processing of ad hoc scalar implicatures in English. The first shows that L+H* accents facilitate implicatures relative to H* accents. The second replicates this finding…
Choice and prohibition in non-monotonic contexts
Disjunctions in the scope of possibility modals give rise to a conjunctive inference, generally referred to as 'free choice.' For example,Emma can take Spanish or Calculussuggests that Emma can take Spanish and can take Calculus. This inference is not valid on standard semantics for modals in combination with a Boolean semantics for disjunction. Hence free choice has sparked a whole industry of theories in philosophy of language and semantics. Th…
The role of focus intonation in implicature computation: A Comparison With Only and Also
The function of focus is to activate alternatives, and these activated alternatives are used to compute the corresponding inferences of an utterance. The experimental research reported here investigates the role of focus intonation in inference computation and its interplay with the overt focus particles only and also. In particular, I compare the mechanisms underlying the computation of exhaustivity implicatures, assertions, and additive presupp…
Role of Contrastive and Noncontrastive Associates in the Interpretation of Focus Particles
The present research examines the mechanisms underlying the comprehension of focus alternatives. In particular, we investigate whether listeners determine alternatives based on general semantic priming mechanisms or whether they only consider contrastive alternatives, elements that can replace the expression in focus. In a probe recognition experiment, we compare the retrieval of contrastive alternatives with that of general associates of a focus…
Intonation and Pragmatic Enrichment: How Intonation Constrains Ad Hoc Scalar Inferences
Pragmatic inferences require listeners to use alternatives to arrive at the speaker’s intended meaning. Previous research has shown that intonation interacts with alternatives but not how it does so. We present two mouse tracking experiments that test how pitch accents affect the processing of ad hoc scalar implicatures in English. The first shows that L+H* accents facilitate implicatures relative to H* accents. The second replicates this finding…
Alternative Sets in Language Processing: How Focus Alternatives are Represented in the Mind
The Scalar Inferences of Strong Scalar Terms under Negative Quantifiers and Constraints on the Theory of Alternatives
Chemla & Spector (2011) have found experimental evidence that a universal sentence embedding a weak scalar term like Every student read some of the books has the strong inference that no student read all of the books, in addition to the weak one that not every student did (see also Clifton Jr & Dube 2010, Potts et al. 2015, Gotzner & Benz 2017, forthcoming). While it is controversial how this strong inference should be derived, there is consensus…
Scalar diversity and negative strengthening
In recent years, experimental research has demontrated great variability in the ratesof scalar inferences across different triggering expressions (Doran et al. 2009, 2012, van Tielet al. 2016). These studies have been taken as evidence against the so-called uniformity assumption,which posits that scalar implicature is triggered by a single mechanism and that thebehaviour of one scale should generalize to the whole family of scales. In the followi…
Embedded implicature in a new interactive paradigm
Previous research on scalar implicature has primarily relied on metalinguistic judgmenttasks and found varying rates of such inferences depending on the nature of the task andcontextual manipulations. This paper introduces a novel interactive paradigm involving both aproduction and a comprehension component, thereby fixing a precise conversational context.The main research question is what is reliably communicated by some in this communicativeset…
Vagueness in Implicature: The Case of Modified Adjectives
We show that the interpretation of sentences like John is not very Adj depends on whether Adj is vague. We argue that this follows from a constraint on the interaction between vagueness and conversational implicature, a domain that has not been studied extensively. The constraint states that implicatures are not drawn if they lead to “borderline contradictions” (see Ripley 2011; Alxatib & Pelletier 2011; a.o.), a natural extension of the idea tha…
The life and times of focus alternatives: Tracing the activation of alternatives to a focused constituent in language comprehension
The function of focus is to activate a set of alternatives, providing the locus for focus-sensitive particles likeonly. In the past decade, psycholinguistic research has shown that listeners entertain a set of alternatives in online language comprehension, similar to the algorithm stipulated by Alternative Semantics. The purpose of the present review is to gain a comprehensive picture of the role of focus alternatives in utterance comprehension a…
The role of focus intonation in implicature computation: A Comparison With Only and Also
The function of focus is to activate alternatives, and these activated alternatives are used to compute the corresponding inferences of an utterance. The experimental research reported here investigates the role of focus intonation in inference computation and its interplay with the overt focus particles only and also. In particular, I compare the mechanisms underlying the computation of exhaustivity implicatures, assertions, and additive presupp…
Disjunction Triggers Exhaustivity Implicatures in 4- to 5-Year-Olds: Investigating the Role of Access to Alternatives
Children’s difficulty deriving scalar implicatures has been attributed to a variety of factors including processing limitations, an inability to access scalar alternatives, and pragmatic tolerance. The present research explores the nature of children’s difficulty by investigating a previously unexplored kind of inference—an exhaustivity implicature that is triggered by disjunction. We reasoned that if children are able to draw quantity implicatur…
The role of non-categorical relations in establishing focus alternative sets
Categorisation is arguably the most important organising principle in semantic memory. However, elements that are not in a categorical relation can be dynamically grouped together when the context provides a common theme for these elements. In the field of sentence (and discourse) comprehension, alternatives to a focused element can be thought of as a set of elements determined by a theme given in the utterance context. According to Alternative S…
Choice and prohibition in non-monotonic contexts
Disjunctions in the scope of possibility modals give rise to a conjunctive inference, generally referred to as 'free choice.' For example,Emma can take Spanish or Calculussuggests that Emma can take Spanish and can take Calculus. This inference is not valid on standard semantics for modals in combination with a Boolean semantics for disjunction. Hence free choice has sparked a whole industry of theories in philosophy of language and semantics. Th…
The polarity asymmetry of negative strengthening: Dissociating adjectival polarity from facethreatening potential
The interpretation of negated antonyms is characterised by a polarity asymmetry: the negation of a positive polarity antonym (X is not interesting) is more likely to be strengthened to convey its opposite (‘X is uninteresting’) than the negation of a negative polarity antonym (X is not uninteresting to convey that ‘X is interesting’) is. A classical explanation of this asymmetry relies on face-management. Since the predication of a negative polar…
Embedded implicature: What can be left unsaid
Previous research on scalar implicature has primarily relied on meta-linguistic judgment tasks and found varying rates of such inferences depending on the nature of the task and contextual manipulations. This paper introduces a novel interactive paradigm involving both a production and a comprehension side and a precise conversational goal. The main research question is what is reliably communicated by some in this communicative setting, both whe…
Meaning and Alternatives
Alternatives and competition in language are pervasive at all levels of linguistic analysis. More specifically, alternatives have been argued to play a prominent role in an ever-growing class of phenomena in the investigation of natural language meaning. In this article, we focus on scalar implicatures, as they are arguably the most paradigmatic case of an alternative-based phenomenon. We first review the main challenge for theories of alternativ…
Measurements, Numerals and Scales: Essays in Honour of Stephanie Solt
A closer look at the sources of variability in scalar implicature derivation: A review
For more than 20 years, studies in experimental pragmatics have provided invaluable insights into the cognitive processes involved in deriving scalar implicatures and achieving inferential comprehension. However, the reports have always contained a notable degree of variability that remained inadequately discussed in the literature. For instance, upon closer inspection of the experimental record, one can always find a group of individuals who ten…
The Interpretation of Relative and Absolute Adjectives Under Negation
Negation typically has a contradictory effect on interpretation. At the same time, negated statements are often underinformative, which leaves room for pragmatic effects such as negative strengthening, where negated adjectives are pragmatically strengthened to convey their antonym (e.g., not large $\leadsto $ ‘small’). Here, we investigate a theoretical controversy relating to the mechanism deriving negative strengthening effects. According to Ho…
Negative strengthening: The interplay of evaluative polarity and scale structure
This work investigates absolute adjectives in the not very construction and how their pragmatic interpretation depends on the evaluative polarity and the scale structure of their antonymic pairs. Our experimental study reveals that evaluatively positive adjectives (clean) are more likely to be strengthened than evaluatively negative ones (dirty), and that maximum standard adjectives (clean or closed) are more likely to be strengthened than minimu…
On the Role of Loopholes in Polite Communication: Linking Subjectivity and Pragmatic Inference
Existing proposals on the attenuating uses of indirect, negated expressions (e.g., not happy to mean sad) agree that speakers exploit indirectness for pragmatic purposes but differ on the underlying sources they attribute to these uses. Here, we synthesize existing proposals via adjective subjectivity, which operationalizes the notion of loopholes for plausible deniability. We present experimental evidence that the degree of subjectivity of an ad…
Gradable adjective interpretation under negation: The role of competition
Gradable adjectives have recently drawn a lot of attention in experimental semantics/pragmatics regarding the different interpretations they trigger depending on scale structure, polarity, extremeness, and presence of negation (e.g., Gotzner et al. 2018b; a; Leffel et al. 2019). The current study investigates the interpretation of relative and absolute gradable adjectives in the scope of negation (e.g., not large and not clean, respectively) capi…
Does It Matter What Is Said and Who Said It? The Interpretation of Trump’s and Harris’ Statements Among Republican and Democrat Voters
The Gricean model of communication assumes that cooperation is a precondition for successful communication but humans often use language non-cooperatively. How do language users calibrate cooperation when deciphering communicated content? The current work probes how belief alignment shapes the interpretation of underinformative statements attributed to politicians (Donald Trump or Kamala Harris) presented to self-identified Republican and Democra…
Reasoning with epistemic adverbs in child Romanian: Insights from the Shadow Play Paradigm
Our study experimentally investigates the comprehension of epistemic adverbs (poate ‘maybe’, sigur ‘certainly’) in child Romanian, an important undertaking as previous experimental acquisition studies have focused on epistemic modal verbs, and rarely on Romanian. Children were found to be non-adult-like in comprehending epistemic modal verbs, but this could be due to struggles with modal verb meaning rather than due to failure with epistemic reas…
Scalar alternative activation for implicature processing: A Lexical Decision Study With Antonyms and Negation
Scalar words such as warm may give rise to inferences such as warm but not hot. Under standard accounts, such scalar implicatures are derived by negating stronger alternatives. In processing, weaker scale-mates ( warm ) prime stronger ones ( hot ), suggesting that the latter are used in implicature processing (De Carvalho et al., 2016. Frontiers in Psychology , 7, 1500; Ronai & Xiang, 2023. Experiments in Linguistic Meaning , 2, 229–240). We test…
Linguistics (20 works) · Computer Science (17 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Artificial Intelligence (11 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (11 works) · Implicature (10 works) · Pragmatics (10 works) · Mathematics (8 works) · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism (8 works)