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Zimmermann, Thomas Ede

doi:10.1023/a:1011255819284

Cited by 265 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…For example, although (5) is normally understood as implying (5)a and (5)b, this is not necessary and the following discourse is entirely natural: Mary is allowed to eat an apple or a pear, although I can't remember which. This type of cancellation can in principle be explained in many ways (see in particular Zimmermann, 2000, which discusses cancellation carefully as a signal of an 2 We will use "disjunct" in a liberal manner: whenever a sentence contains a disjunction, we will refer to the sentence obtained by keeping one or the other of the two sides of the disjunction as a "disjunct". 3 We will not be concerned with the exclusive reading of the disjunction which may also arise in parallel of free choice, leading to the inference that if Mary is allowed to choose her preferred option (free choice), she cannot elect both options at the same time (exclusive reading).…”

Section: Free Choice Inferencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Processing inferences at the semantics/pragmatics frontier: Disjunctions and free choice

2014

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Linguistic inferences have traditionally been studied and categorized in several categories, such as entailments, implicatures or presuppositions. This typology is mostly based on traditional linguistic means, such as introspective judgments about phrases occurring in different constructions, in different conversational contexts. More recently, the processing properties of these inferences have also been studied (see, e.g., recent work showing that scalar implicatures is a costly phenomenon). Our focus is on free choice permission, a phenomenon by which conjunctive inferences are unexpectedly added to disjunctive sentences. For instance, a sentence such as "Mary is allowed to eat an ice-cream or a cake" is normally understood as granting permission both for eating an ice-cream and for eating a cake. We provide data from four processing studies, which show that, contrary to arguments coming from the theoretical literature, free choice inferences are different from scalar implicatures.

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Section: Free Choice Inferencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Processing inferences at the semantics/pragmatics frontier: Disjunctions and free choice

2014

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“…Influential solutions were attempted by Kamp (1973Kamp ( , 1978, but, more recently, the puzzle has inspired many more linguists to try a solution. Semantically oriented approaches reconsider the semantics of disjunctions (Zimmermann 2000, Geurts 2005, Simons 2005 or of the modals involved (Merin 1992, van Rooij 2000, Asher & Bonevac 2005, Barker 2010. Pragmatic approaches, more or less close in spirit to Grice's programme, have been given by others (Kratzer & Shimoyama 2002, Chierchia 2004, Schulz 2005, Fox 2007.…”

Section: Uc S (♦B)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantity implicatures, exhaustive interpretation, and rational conversation

Franke

2011

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187

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Quantity implicatures are inferences triggered by an utterance based on what other utterances a speaker could have made instead. Using ideas and formalisms from game theory, I demonstrate that these inferences can be explained in a strictly Gricean sense as rational behavior. To this end, I offer a procedure for constructing the context of utterance insofar as it is relevant for quantity reasoning as a game between speaker and hearer. I then give a new solution concept that improves on classical equilibrium approaches in that it uniquely selects the desired "empirically correct" play in these interpretation games by a chain of back-and-forth reasoning about players' behavior. To make this formal approach more accessible to a wider audience, I give a simple algorithm with the help of which the model's solution can be computed without having to do heavy calculations of probabilities, expected utilities and the like. This rationalistic approach subsumes and improves on recent exhaustivity-based approaches. It makes correct and uniform predictions for quantity implicatures of various epistemic varieties, free choice readings of disjunctions, as well as a phenomenon tightly related to the latter, namely so-called "simplification of disjunctive antecedents".

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“…I don't think this is a major concession to localists. Second, according to Zimmermann (2000), even a disjunctive permission of the form You may do φ or you may do ψ gives rise to the free choice inference, and according to Merin (1992) a conjunctive permission of the form You may do φ and ψ allows the addressee to perform only φ. I have no idea how to pragmatically account for those intuitions without reinterpreting the semantics of conjunction as well as disjunction. If our analysis is acceptable, it points to the direction in which richer pragmatic theories have to go: (i) we have to take both the speaker's and the hearer's perspective into account, and (ii) one-step inferences (or strong Bi-OT) are not enough, more reasoning has to…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conjunctive interpretation of disjunction

Rooij¹

2010

S&P

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In this extended commentary I discuss the problem of how to account for "conjunctive" readings of some sentences with embedded disjunctions for globalist analyses of conversational implicatures. Following Franke (2010Franke ( , 2009, I suggest that earlier proposals failed, because they did not take into account the interactive reasoning of what else the speaker could have said, and how else the hearer could have interpreted the (alternative) sentence(s). I show how Franke's idea relates to more traditional pragmatic interpretation strategies.

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Cited by 265 publications

References 12 publications

Processing inferences at the semantics/pragmatics frontier: Disjunctions and free choice

Processing inferences at the semantics/pragmatics frontier: Disjunctions and free choice

Quantity implicatures, exhaustive interpretation, and rational conversation

Conjunctive interpretation of disjunction

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