scholarly journals The interpretative options of anaphoric complex demonstratives

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Hinterwimmer ◽  
Umesh Patil
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Definite Description ◽  
Definite Descriptions ◽  
Complex Demonstratives ◽  
Complex Demonstrative ◽  
Acceptability Rating ◽  
Pragmatic Account ◽  
Present Experimental Evidence ◽  
Made In ◽  
Alternative Economy

In this paper, we present experimental evidence from a ‘yes’/’no’ judgement task and twoacceptability rating studies (Experiments 1a-c) for the claim made in Hinterwimmer (2019) thatsentences with two anaphorically interpreted complex demonstratives are less acceptable thansentences with two anaphorically interpreted definite descriptions and sentences where one ofthe two previously introduced referents is picked up by a complex demonstrative, while the otherone is picked up by a definite description. The results of Experiment 1a and 1b are in principlecompatible with the account argued for in Hinterwimmer (2019), according to which the (potentiallyabstract) demonstrations presupposed by demonstratives may not have overlapping trajectories.However, sentences with two anaphorically interpreted complex demonstratives are not judgedas unacceptable as would be expected if they involved a presupposition violation. Therefore, wepropose an alternative, economy-based pragmatic account that builds on Ahn (2019) and Nowak(2019). The question of whether the observed pattern is more compatible with the accountproposed by Hinterwimmer (2019) or the alternative pragmatic account is directly addressed in afurther acceptability rating study (Experiment 1c). The design of that study is similar to that ofExperiment 1b, but it includes as fillers both sentences clearly violating a presupposition andsentences violating a pragmatic constraint. Since the ratings for sentences containing twoanaphorically interpreted complex demonstratives are closer to the ratings for sentences violatinga pragmatic constraint than for sentences violating a presupposition, we conclude that thealternative pragmatic account is preferable to the account by Hinterwimmer (2019).

Talking Behind Your Back: Communication and Team Cooperation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Abbink ◽  
Lu Dong ◽  
Lingbo Huang
Keyword(s):  
Behavioral Economics ◽  
Decision Analysis ◽  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Team Communication ◽  
Team Cooperation ◽  
Profit Allocation ◽  
Asymmetric Communication ◽  
Present Experimental Evidence

Communication is one of the most effective devices in promoting team cooperation. However, asymmetric communication sometimes breeds collusion and hurts team efficiency. Here, we present experimental evidence showing that excluding one member from team communication hurts team cooperation; the communicating partners collude in profit allocation against the excluded member, and the latter reacts by exerting less effort. Allowing the partners to reach out to the excluded member partially restores cooperation and fairness in profit allocation, but it does not stop the partners from talking behind that member’s back even when they could have talked publicly. The partners sometimes game the system by tricking the excluded member into contributing but then grabbing all profits for themselves. This paper was accepted by Axel Ockenfels, behavioral economics and decision analysis.

Moral Perceptions of Advised Actions

2019 ◽  
Vol 65 (8) ◽  
pp. 3904-3927 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucas C. Coffman ◽  
Alexander Gotthard-Real
Keyword(s):  
Behavioral Economics ◽  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Relational Contract ◽  
Suggestive Evidence ◽  
Present Experimental Evidence

Can an organization avoid blame for an unpopular action when an adviser advises it to do it? We present experimental evidence suggesting this is the case—advice to be selfish substantially decreases punishment of being selfish. Further, this result is true despite advisers’ misaligned incentives, known to all: Through a relational contract incentive, advisers are motivated to tell the decision makers what they want to hear. Through incentivized elicitations, we find suggestive evidence that advice moves punishment by affecting beliefs of how necessary the selfish action was. In follow-up treatments, however, we show advice does not decrease punishment solely through a beliefs channel. Advice not only changes beliefs about what happened, but also the perceived morality of it. Finally, in treatments in which advisers are available, the data suggest selfish decision makers act more selfishly. This paper was accepted by Axel Ockenfels, behavioral economics.

Why Definite Descriptions Really are Referring Terms

2005 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-79
Author(s):  
John-Michael Kuczynski
Keyword(s):  
Definite Descriptions ◽  
Referring Expressions ◽  
Frege’S Puzzle ◽  
Complex Demonstratives ◽  
Frege's Puzzle ◽  
King Of France

According to Russell, '... the phi ...' means: 'exactly one object has phi and ... that object ...'. Strawson pointed out that, if somebody asked how many kings of France there were, it would be deeply inappropriate to respond by saying '... the king of France ...': the respondent appears to be presupposing the very thing that, under the circumstances, he ought to be asserting. But it would seem that if Russell's theory were correct, the respondent would be asserting exactly what he was asked to assert. So Russell's theory wrongly predicts that the respondent's answer will be appropriate. Russellians deal with this by saying that this anti-Russellian intuition embodies our reaction not to what is semantically encoded in the respondent's words, but to what is pragmatically imparted by them. So Russell's theory is correct: the fact that it appears wrong is due to the distorting effects of pragmatics. In this paper I show that pragmatic phenomena cannot possibly be responsible for the just mentioned anti-Russellian intuition. No matter how hard we try to put the blame on pragmatics, Russell's theory still falls short. It follows that defi nite descriptions really are what they appear to be: referring expressions. I argue that defi nite descriptions are complex demonstratives; and, within that framework, I deal with cases where defi nite descriptions appear to be functioning non-referentially. I also solve Frege's puzzle within the framework defi ned by my treatment of defi nite descriptions taken in conjunction with Kripke-Kaplan semantics.

Convergence and intonation: historical evidence from Buenos Aires Spanish

2004 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURA COLANTONI ◽  
JORGE GURLEKIAN
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Contrastive Focus ◽  
Italian Immigration ◽  
Early Peak ◽  
Intonational Phrases ◽  
Pitch Accents ◽  
Present Experimental Evidence

In this paper we present experimental evidence showing that Buenos Aires Spanish differs from other Spanish varieties in the realization of pre-nuclear pitch accents and in the final fall in broad focus declarative utterances. Whereas other Spanish varieties have been described consistently as showing late peak alignments, Buenos Aires Spanish displays early peak alignments. The alignment pattern found in Buenos Aires broad focus declarative utterances is not totally foreign to Spanish: it is attested in a quite different function, i.e. to signal contrastive focus. In addition, Buenos Aires Spanish also seems to differ from other Spanish varieties in the realization of the intonation contour in utterance-final intonational phrases, where a pronounced tendency for down-stepped peaks is observed. We argue that these patterns, which emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, and coincided with the peak of Italian immigration, are due to a combination of direct and indirect transfer from Italian. As a result, two intonational systems that were typologically similar before contact took place (Hualde, 2002) became more similar after contact, in what can be interpreted as a case of convergence.

scholarly journals Human Cooperation When Acting Through Autonomous Machines

2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (9) ◽  
pp. 3482-3487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Celso M. de Melo ◽  
Stacy Marsella ◽  
Jonathan Gratch
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Autonomous Vehicles ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Collective Interest ◽  
Intelligent Machines ◽  
Cooperative Society ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Autonomous Machines ◽  
Present Experimental Evidence

Recent times have seen an emergence of intelligent machines that act autonomously on our behalf, such as autonomous vehicles. Despite promises of increased efficiency, it is not clear whether this paradigm shift will change how we decide when our self-interest (e.g., comfort) is pitted against the collective interest (e.g., environment). Here we show that acting through machines changes the way people solve these social dilemmas and we present experimental evidence showing that participants program their autonomous vehicles to act more cooperatively than if they were driving themselves. We show that this happens because programming causes selfish short-term rewards to become less salient, leading to considerations of broader societal goals. We also show that the programmed behavior is influenced by past experience. Finally, we report evidence that the effect generalizes beyond the domain of autonomous vehicles. We discuss implications for designing autonomous machines that contribute to a more cooperative society.

Dark Soliton Formation for Light-Induced Waveguiding in Photorefractive inP:Fe

1997 ◽  
Vol 484 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Chauvet ◽  
S. A. Hawkins ◽  
G. J. Salamo ◽  
M. Segev ◽  
D. F. Bliss ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Steady State ◽  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Dark Soliton ◽  
Screening Solitons ◽  
Present Experimental Evidence

AbstractWe present experimental evidence for the observation of steady-state dark photorefractive screening solitons trapped in bulk InP:Fe.

Phonotactic c(l)ues to Bantu noun class disambiguation

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Braver ◽  
Wm. G. Bennett
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
The Other ◽  
Bantu Language ◽  
Noun Classes ◽  
Noun Class ◽  
Present Experimental Evidence

AbstractWhile a number of phonologists assume that phonotactics can provide clues to abstract morphological information, this possibility has largely gone unconsidered in work on Bantu noun classes. We present experimental evidence from isiXhosa (a Bantu language of the Nguni family, from South Africa), showing that speakers make use of root phonotactics when assigning noun classes to nonce words. Nouns in Xhosa bear class-indicating prefixes, but some of these prefixes are homophonous – and therefore ambiguous. Our findings show that when speakers are presented with words that have prefixes ambiguous between two classes, phonotactic factors can condition them to treat the nouns as one class or the other. This suggests that noun class (and other abstract morphological information) is not only stored in the lexicon, but is also redundantly indicated by phonotactic clues.

scholarly journals Uncalculating cooperation is used to signal trustworthiness

2016 ◽  
Vol 113 (31) ◽  
pp. 8658-8663 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jillian J. Jordan ◽  
Moshe Hoffman ◽  
Martin A. Nowak ◽  
David G. Rand
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
Ethical Principles ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Costs And Benefits ◽  
Present Experimental Evidence ◽  
Do So

Humans frequently cooperate without carefully weighing the costs and benefits. As a result, people may wind up cooperating when it is not worthwhile to do so. Why risk making costly mistakes? Here, we present experimental evidence that reputation concerns provide an answer: people cooperate in an uncalculating way to signal their trustworthiness to observers. We present two economic game experiments in which uncalculating versus calculating decision-making is operationalized by either a subject’s choice of whether to reveal the precise costs of cooperating (Exp. 1) or the time a subject spends considering these costs (Exp. 2). In both experiments, we find that participants are more likely to engage in uncalculating cooperation when their decision-making process is observable to others. Furthermore, we confirm that people who engage in uncalculating cooperation are perceived as, and actually are, more trustworthy than people who cooperate in a calculating way. Taken together, these data provide the first empirical evidence, to our knowledge, that uncalculating cooperation is used to signal trustworthiness, and is not merely an efficient decision-making strategy that reduces cognitive costs. Our results thus help to explain a range of puzzling behaviors, such as extreme altruism, the use of ethical principles, and romantic love.

Optical Investigations of Symmetry Breaking in GaInP2

1990 ◽  
Vol 198 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Mascarenhas ◽  
Sarah Kurtz ◽  
A. Kibbler ◽  
J.M. Olsonsolar
Keyword(s):  
Band Structure ◽  
Symmetry Breaking ◽  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Band Gap ◽  
Vapor Phase ◽  
Vapor Phase Epitaxy ◽  
Spontaneous Breaking ◽  
Cubic Symmetry ◽  
Gaas Substrates ◽  
Present Experimental Evidence

ABSTRACTWe present experimental evidence for the spontaneous breaking of cubic symmetry in the band structure of films of Ga0 52 1n0 48P grown by organomeltallic vapor phase epitaxy on (100) GaAs substrates. We show how this effect is related to the spontaneous ordering of the alloy, and its correlation with the anomalous lowering of the band-gap observed in these films.

scholarly journals Incremental and predictive interpretation: Experimental evidence and possible accounts

2015 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Brasoveanu ◽  
Jakub Dotlacil
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Formal Semantics ◽  
Main Question ◽  
The Real ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Right ◽  
Present Experimental Evidence

The main question we investigate is whether meaning representations of the kind that are pervasive in formal semantics are built up incrementally and predictively when language is used in real time, in much the same way that the real-time construction of syntactic representations has been argued to be. The interaction of presupposition resolution with conjunctions vs. conditionals with a sentence-final antecedent promises to provide us with the right kind of evidence. Consider the following 'cataphoric' example and the contrast between "and" and "if": "Tina will have coffee with Alex again and / if she had coffee with him at the local cafe". We expect the second clause to be more difficult after "and" than after "if": the conjunction "and" signals that an antecedent that could resolve the "again" presupposition is unlikely to come after this point (the second conjunct is interpreted relative to the context provided by the first conjunct), while the conditional "if" leaves open the possibility that a suitable resolution for the "again" presupposition is forthcoming (the first clause is interpreted relative to the context provided by the second clause). We present experimental evidence supporting these predictions and discuss two approaches to analyze this kind of data.

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