The meaning of plural definites: A decision-theoretic approach

By Sophia A. Malamud. 2012

75 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper has two mutually motivating goals. The empirical goal is to demonstrate that definite plurals are expressions whose interpretation requires an approach that incorporates the goals of the speaker and hearer. The theoretical goal is to contribute to the development of a mathematical model of the pragmatic reasoning involved in the interpretation of underspecified utterances. I propose a decision-theoretic approach in which alternative interpretations of underspecified expressions are built up compositionally, and the resulting interpretation is the disjunction of maximally optimal alternatives. For definite plurals, this derives the correct interpretations in a variety of linguistic and situational contexts based on pragmatic and lexical cues. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.5.3 BibTeX info

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fd25d2daebef7e6a720eab96cdbc804ed832190c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

1. Emmanuel Chemla
2. Manuel Križ

In Language and Linguistics

1. Manuel Križ
2. Emmanuel Chemla
3. Danny Fox
4. Jacopo Romoli
5. Florian Schwarz

Citations in the corpus

• Two methods to find truth-value gaps and their application to the projection problem of homogeneity (2015, methodology): “Inspired by Krifka (1996), Malamud (2012) gives the following example: (4) Context: Mary is going on a road trip with a friend.”