Our next Semantics Group speaker will be Josh Knobe, this Friday, September 21, at 12:30pm in room #104. (Please note the nonstandard time and place.)
Title: The Statistical, the Prescriptive, and the Undifferentiated
Abstract:
Some linguistic expressions are used to express statistical claims (e.g., quantificational adverbs like usually), while others are used to express prescriptive claims (e.g., deontic modals like should). Strikingly, however, a series of recent studies indicate that people's use of certain expressions is actually governed by a mix of the statistical and very prescriptive. This same basic result has been obtained in research on a number of very different sorts of linguistic expressions: impersonal pronouns, generics, gradable adjectives, and root modals. I will be discussing research on all four of these types of expressions, and on an attempt to understand why people's use of all of them involved this same statistical/prescriptive mixture.