I hope everyone is really excited for Greg Scontras coming to Boston University on October 12th! (Because I know I am). A former Boston University Linguistics major, Greg is a Ph.D student at Harvard and is returning to Boston University to tell us about his research at Harvard. (Abstract below)
Facebook Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/277254892393972/
Abstract: What does it mean to compare sets of objects along a scale, for example by saying ‘‘the men are taller than the women’’? Speakers have reliable truth-judgments when comparing pluralities, however the semantics of these constructions cannot follow straightforwardly from the semantics generally assumed for comparatives (e.g., von Stechow, 1984; Heim, 1985; Kennedy, 1997) or for plurals (e.g., Link, 1983; Landman, 1989; Schwarzschild, 1996). Past work on plural comparison (Matushanksy and Ruys, 2006) attempts to capture speakers’ intuitions in a semantics that reduces plural comparison to a multitude of comparisons between the individual members of the compared pluralities. We present experimental evidence that plural comparison does not reduce to the comparison of individual members, but rather to the comparison of collective properties inferred from the pluralities involved. Our results support the hypothesis that a plurality can have a single property associated with it that differs from the properties true of each of its parts. More generally, these results support the idea that pluralities are actively represented as single units.
Joint work with Peter Graff (MIT) and Noah D. Goodman (Stanford)