Experimenting with every American king

Bibliographic Data

ID4569064
AuthorsPoppy Mankowitz (0000-0003-1308-1041, University of Bristol, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume31
Issue4
Pages349-387
Publication date2023-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueNatural Language Semantics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0925-854X • E-ISSN: 1572-865X
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/s11050-023-09211-2
PMID37970178
OpenAlexW4387957962
LanguageEN
References cited38

The standard contemporary semantics for 'every' predict the truth of occurrences of sentences with restrictors that denote the empty set, such as 'Every American king lives in New York'. The literature on empty restrictors has been concerned with explaining a particular violation of this prediction: many assessors consider empty-restrictor sentences to be odd rather than valued, and they are apparently more likely to do so when such sentences include determiners like 'every' as opposed to those like 'no'. Empirical investigation of this issue is overdue, and I present the results of three experimental surveys. The first unexpected outcome is that there is no evidence of a contrast in assessors' tendencies to judge sentences to be odd based on determiner type. An additional surprising result is that those assessors who assign a truth value to sentences where 'every' combines with an empty restrictor overwhelmingly assign the value false. The full results do not fit straightforwardly with any existing account

Determiner · Epistemology · Linguistics · Mathematical economics · Metaphysics · Philosophy of language · Statistics · Syntax · Truth value · Computer Science · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis · Mathematics · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation · Artificial Intelligence

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access