Judith Degen
Biographic Data
| ID | 777104 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Judith Degen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Judith |
| FAMILY NAME | Degen |
| SIGNATURE | DEGEN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2513-0234 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 18 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Evidence For a Discourse Account of Manner-of-Speaking Islands
Sentences with syntactic movement out of sentential complements of manner-of-speaking (MoS) verbs (e.g. whisper, shout) are degraded in acceptability, an effect called the manner-of-speaking (MoS) island effect. Accounts variably attribute the MoS island effect to the violation of the subjacency condition, to the low frequency of MoS verbs taking sentential complements, or to a general information-structural constraint that discourse-backgrounded…
Morpheme Ordering Across Languages Reflects Optimization for Processing Efficiency
The ordering of morphemes in a word displays well-documented regularities across languages. Previous work has explained these in terms of notions such as semantic scope, relevance, and productivity. Here, we test a recently formulated processing theory of the ordering of linguistic units, the efficient tradeoff hypothesis (Hahn et al., 2021). The claim of the theory is that morpheme ordering can partly be explained by the optimization of a tradeo…
The Rational Speech Act Framework
The past decade has seen the rapid development of a new approach to pragmatics that attempts to integrate insights from formal and experimental semantics and pragmatics, psycholinguistics, and computational cognitive science in the study of meaning: probabilistic pragmatics. The most influential probabilistic approach to pragmatics is the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework. In this review, I demonstrate the basic mechanics and commitments of RSA…
Are there factive predicates? An empirical investigation
Are there factive predicates? An empirical investigation
Properties of the content of the clausal complement have long been assumed to distinguish factive predicates like know from nonfactive ones like think (Kiparsky & Kiparsky 1970, inter alia). There is, however, disagreement about which properties define factive predicates, as well as uncertainty about whether the content of the complement of particular predicates exhibits the properties attributed to the content of the complement of factive predic…
Perceptual difficulty differences predict asymmetry in redundant modification with color and material adjectives
When referring to objects, speakers are often more specific than necessary for the purpose of establishing unique reference, e.g., by producing redundant modifiers. A computational model of referring expression production that accounts for many of the key patterns in redundant adjectival modification assumes that adjectives differ in how noisy (reliable), and consequently, how useful they are for reference. Here we investigate one hypothesis abou…
Prior Beliefs Modulate Projection
Beliefs about the world affect language processing and interpretation in several empirical domains. In two experiments, we tested whether subjective prior beliefs about the probability of utterance content modulate projection, that is, listeners’ inferences about speaker commitment to that content. We find that prior beliefs predict projection at both the group and the participant level: the higher the prior belief in a content, the more speakers…
Evaluative adjective sentences
Two contents of evaluative adjective sentences, like Kim was smart to watch the movie, are the prejacent (that Kim watched the movie) and the generalization (that the degree to which Kim watching the movie is smart was higher than the contextual standard of smart). The prejacent is standardly analyzed as a presupposition (e.g., Norrick 1978; Barker 2002; Oshima 2009; Kertz 2010). This paper argues against such analyses of the prejacent because, a…
I know what you're probably going to say
Constraint-Based Pragmatic Processing
Processing language requires integrating information from multiple sources, including context, world knowledge, and the linguistic signal itself. How is this information integrated? A range of positions on the issue is possible, spanned by two extreme positions: extreme informational privilege—certain types of information are processed earlier in online processing and weighted most heavily in the resulting utterance interpretation; and extreme pa…
On the grammatical source of adjective ordering preferences
Scontras et al. (2017) present experimental evidence demonstrating that the best predictor of adjective ordering preferences in the English noun phrase is the subjectivity of the property named by any given adjective: less subjective adjectives are preferred linearly closer to the nouns they modify. The current work builds on this empirical finding by proposing that the reason subjectivity predicts adjective ordering preferences has to do with th…
Definitely, maybe
How Projective is Projective Content? Gradience in Projectivity and At-issueness
Projective content is utterance content that a speaker may be taken to be committed to even when the expression associated with the content occurs embedded under an entailment-canceling operator (e.g., Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet, 1990). It has long been observed that projective content varies in how projective it is (e.g., Karttunen, 1971; Simons, 2001; Abusch, 2010), though preliminary experimental research has been able to confirm only some of…
Processing Scalar Implicature
Three experiments investigated the processing of the implicature associated with some using a “gumball paradigm.” On each trial, participants saw an image of a gumball machine with an upper chamber with 13 gumballs and an empty lower chamber. Gumballs then dropped to the lower chamber and participants evaluated statements, such as “You got some of the gumballs.” Experiment 1 established that some is less natural for reference to small sets (1, 2,…
Investigating the distribution of some (but not all) implicatures using corpora and web-based methods
A prevalent, but to date untested, assumption about lexicalized scalar implicatures such as those from some to not all, is that they fall into the class of GCIs and as such, constitute a homogeneous class of highly regularized and context-independent implicatures. This paper reports a test of this assumption in which linguistically untrained participants’ implicature strength judgments were collected for naturally occurring utterances containing …
Definitely, maybe
Are there factive predicates? An empirical investigation
Properties of the content of the clausal complement have long been assumed to distinguish factive predicates like know from nonfactive ones like think (Kiparsky & Kiparsky 1970, inter alia). There is, however, disagreement about which properties define factive predicates, as well as uncertainty about whether the content of the complement of particular predicates exhibits the properties attributed to the content of the complement of factive predic…
The Rational Speech Act Framework
The past decade has seen the rapid development of a new approach to pragmatics that attempts to integrate insights from formal and experimental semantics and pragmatics, psycholinguistics, and computational cognitive science in the study of meaning: probabilistic pragmatics. The most influential probabilistic approach to pragmatics is the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework. In this review, I demonstrate the basic mechanics and commitments of RSA…
Are there factive predicates? An empirical investigation
Processing Scalar Implicature
Three experiments investigated the processing of the implicature associated with some using a “gumball paradigm.” On each trial, participants saw an image of a gumball machine with an upper chamber with 13 gumballs and an empty lower chamber. Gumballs then dropped to the lower chamber and participants evaluated statements, such as “You got some of the gumballs.” Experiment 1 established that some is less natural for reference to small sets (1, 2,…
Investigating the distribution of some (but not all) implicatures using corpora and web-based methods
A prevalent, but to date untested, assumption about lexicalized scalar implicatures such as those from some to not all, is that they fall into the class of GCIs and as such, constitute a homogeneous class of highly regularized and context-independent implicatures. This paper reports a test of this assumption in which linguistically untrained participants’ implicature strength judgments were collected for naturally occurring utterances containing …
How Projective is Projective Content? Gradience in Projectivity and At-issueness
Projective content is utterance content that a speaker may be taken to be committed to even when the expression associated with the content occurs embedded under an entailment-canceling operator (e.g., Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet, 1990). It has long been observed that projective content varies in how projective it is (e.g., Karttunen, 1971; Simons, 2001; Abusch, 2010), though preliminary experimental research has been able to confirm only some of…
Constraint-Based Pragmatic Processing
Processing language requires integrating information from multiple sources, including context, world knowledge, and the linguistic signal itself. How is this information integrated? A range of positions on the issue is possible, spanned by two extreme positions: extreme informational privilege—certain types of information are processed earlier in online processing and weighted most heavily in the resulting utterance interpretation; and extreme pa…
On the grammatical source of adjective ordering preferences
Scontras et al. (2017) present experimental evidence demonstrating that the best predictor of adjective ordering preferences in the English noun phrase is the subjectivity of the property named by any given adjective: less subjective adjectives are preferred linearly closer to the nouns they modify. The current work builds on this empirical finding by proposing that the reason subjectivity predicts adjective ordering preferences has to do with th…
Definitely, maybe
Evaluative adjective sentences
Two contents of evaluative adjective sentences, like Kim was smart to watch the movie, are the prejacent (that Kim watched the movie) and the generalization (that the degree to which Kim watching the movie is smart was higher than the contextual standard of smart). The prejacent is standardly analyzed as a presupposition (e.g., Norrick 1978; Barker 2002; Oshima 2009; Kertz 2010). This paper argues against such analyses of the prejacent because, a…
I know what you're probably going to say
Perceptual difficulty differences predict asymmetry in redundant modification with color and material adjectives
When referring to objects, speakers are often more specific than necessary for the purpose of establishing unique reference, e.g., by producing redundant modifiers. A computational model of referring expression production that accounts for many of the key patterns in redundant adjectival modification assumes that adjectives differ in how noisy (reliable), and consequently, how useful they are for reference. Here we investigate one hypothesis abou…
Prior Beliefs Modulate Projection
Beliefs about the world affect language processing and interpretation in several empirical domains. In two experiments, we tested whether subjective prior beliefs about the probability of utterance content modulate projection, that is, listeners’ inferences about speaker commitment to that content. We find that prior beliefs predict projection at both the group and the participant level: the higher the prior belief in a content, the more speakers…
Morpheme Ordering Across Languages Reflects Optimization for Processing Efficiency
The ordering of morphemes in a word displays well-documented regularities across languages. Previous work has explained these in terms of notions such as semantic scope, relevance, and productivity. Here, we test a recently formulated processing theory of the ordering of linguistic units, the efficient tradeoff hypothesis (Hahn et al., 2021). The claim of the theory is that morpheme ordering can partly be explained by the optimization of a tradeo…
The Rational Speech Act Framework
The past decade has seen the rapid development of a new approach to pragmatics that attempts to integrate insights from formal and experimental semantics and pragmatics, psycholinguistics, and computational cognitive science in the study of meaning: probabilistic pragmatics. The most influential probabilistic approach to pragmatics is the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework. In this review, I demonstrate the basic mechanics and commitments of RSA…
Are there factive predicates? An empirical investigation
Are there factive predicates? An empirical investigation
Properties of the content of the clausal complement have long been assumed to distinguish factive predicates like know from nonfactive ones like think (Kiparsky & Kiparsky 1970, inter alia). There is, however, disagreement about which properties define factive predicates, as well as uncertainty about whether the content of the complement of particular predicates exhibits the properties attributed to the content of the complement of factive predic…
Evidence For a Discourse Account of Manner-of-Speaking Islands
Sentences with syntactic movement out of sentential complements of manner-of-speaking (MoS) verbs (e.g. whisper, shout) are degraded in acceptability, an effect called the manner-of-speaking (MoS) island effect. Accounts variably attribute the MoS island effect to the violation of the subjacency condition, to the low frequency of MoS verbs taking sentential complements, or to a general information-structural constraint that discourse-backgrounded…
Computer Science (14 works) · Linguistics (11 works) · Artificial Intelligence (9 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (9 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (7 works) · Natural language processing (7 works) · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism (7 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Pragmatics (6 works)