Qin, Erying;
Sun, Chao;
Breheny, Richard;
(2025)
Does ‘a couple’ pattern with scalars or numbers - Insights from inference and ‘so’ tasks.
In:
Experiments in Linguistic Meaning.
(pp. pp. 299-307).
Linguistic Society of America: Philadelphia, PA, USA.
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Abstract
Previous research establishes that paucal quantifiers like ‘a couple’ are ambiguous between the literal meaning of ‘at least two’ and the enriched meaning understood as conveying a restriction on quantity, the latter of which can be explained by a pragmatic phenomenon, i.e. scalar inference (SI). To address whether this ambiguity patterns with that of scalars or numbers, our Experiment 1 explored the behaviours of ‘a couple’ and scalars with two types of probe questions in inference tasks, and Experiment 2 continued this theme by testing the naturalness rating for ‘a couple’ and scalars in an ‘X so not Y’ construction. The results of our experiments indicate two natures of ‘a couple’: a non-monotonic /cardinal (approximately two) and proportional (a small proportion of).
| Type: | Proceedings paper |
|---|---|
| Title: | Does ‘a couple’ pattern with scalars or numbers - Insights from inference and ‘so’ tasks |
| Event: | Experiments in Linguistic Meaning |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.3765/elm.3.5814 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.3765/elm.3.5814 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright (c) 2025 Erying Qin, Chao Sun, Richard Breheny Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY 4.0 license. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Linguistics |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10204137 |
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