Vagueness

Though vague phenomena have been studied extensively for many decades, it is only in recent years that researchers sought the support of quantitative data. This chapter highlights and discusses the insights that experimental methods brought to the study of vagueness. One area focused on are ‘borderline contradictions’, that is, sentences like ‘She is neither tall nor not tall’ that are contradictory when analysed in classical logic, but are actually acceptable as descriptions of borderline cases. The flourishing of theories and experimental studies that borderline contradictions have led to are examined closely. Beyond this illustrative case, an overview of recent studies that concern the classification of types of vagueness, the use of numbers, rounding, number modification, and the general pragmatic status of vagueness is provided.

Theory of Mind

Current accounts of Theory of Mind development have tried to explain the results of false-belief tasks with infants and children, but failed to account for the evidence of early belief reasoning reported in the experimental pragmatics literature. This chapter reviews a number of studies on the acquisition of the mental state verb know; toddlers’ understanding of factivity (or the difference between knowing and thinking); early referential communication and toddlers’ reliance on others’ engagement as a proxy for their knowledge, and the emergence of preschoolers’ understanding of the seeing-knowing relation. The results of these studies reveal a more nuanced picture than those of false-belief tasks, with some Theory of Mind abilities emerging earlier in conversation than in laboratory tasks, while children’s epistemic theories continue to develop beyond their passing of standard Theory of Mind tasks.

Verbal Uncertainty

When communicating uncertain facts, about risky outcomes or about the likelihood of future prospects, one may use numerical probabilities (e.g. there is a 20% probability) or verbal probabilities (e.g. there is a small chance). The present chapter provides an overview of the research into verbal probabilities; a survey of the methods used to tackle the meaning of verbal probabilities and unveil their usage; and an overview of the key findings in the field, including how people interpret the degree of certainty conveyed by verbal probabilities, the factors that affect this interpretation, how verbal probabilities are directional and can be used to frame uncertainty and the way speakers use verbal probabilities to make predictions.

Spatial Terms

Across the world’s languages, spatial terms are organized around a set of basic, non-linguistic spatial notions. Nevertheless, there is also considerable cross-linguistic variation in terms of both the kinds of linguistic devices used to express spatial relations and the way these devices carve up the semantic domain of space. This chapter reviews literature on spatial terms cross-linguistically, focusing on three main sub-divisions of the spatial domain: location (i.e. the static position of an object in space); motion (i.e. the dynamic displacement of an object in space); and Frames of Reference (FoR; i.e. abstract spatial-coordinate axes imposed on spatial configurations). The intricate relation between spatial language and non-linguistic spatial cognition is discussed throughout the chapter.

Exhaustivity in It-Clefts

This chapter provides an overview of the most important theoretical positions on the exhaustivity inference often associated with it-clefts in English and comparable structures in other languages alongside with a brief review of the results of a number of experimental studies. There is a surprising discrepancy between the predictions of the theoretical analyses and the empirical findings. While theoretical approaches tend to derive exhaustivity as a necessary semantic inference, most experimental studies suggest that the exhaustivity of it-clefts might be a pragmatic inference. The chapter discusses this discrepancy in some detail and suggests some potential solutions.

Modified Numerals

This chapter discusses the use of experimental methods for probing the semantics and pragmatics of numeral modification. Modified numerals, like ‘at least 3’ or ‘more than 2’, are interesting from a theoretical point of view because they give rise to a range of implicature-like inferences depending on the form of the modifier and the immediate linguistic context. The chapter discusses both studies that aim to counter or support existing theoretical proposals in the literature and studies that bring in entirely new theoretical issues. It also reflects on methodological issues in this area.

Negation

Negation has long been of interest to logicians and philosophers, and relatively recently to psycholinguists and pragmatists. In terms of the processing of negation, psycholinguistics studies have shown two effects that call for an explanation: the first is the asymmetry between its frequent use in natural language and its apparent processing costs, often reported in psycholinguistics studies; the second is the finding that, in early stages of processing, negation seems to be ignored and attention seems to be focused on its positive argument. In terms of pragmatic functions, it has been shown that despite its simple semantic meaning, negation interacts with context to produce rich pragmatic effects. Both negation processing and its pragmatic functions present puzzles that cannot be explained by its semantic function.

Pronouns

When do speakers produce ambiguous expressions? How do comprehenders interpret such expressions to infer a speaker’s intended meaning? This chapter reviews a body of work on pronoun production and interpretation, considering a number of computational, linguistic, and psycholinguistic frameworks and the factors that have been posited to drive pronoun use. These factors include surface structural elements (grammatical role, syntactic parallelism), information structural cues (topichood), lexical semantics and real-world knowledge (thematic roles, causality), as well as aspects of the larger discourse (recency, rhetorical structure, coherence relations). The chapter then turns to a more general model of message production and interpretation that incorporates elements of existing pronoun models using a Bayesian approach.

Distributivity

This chapter introduces the related topics of distributivity, collectivity, and cumulativity. Evidence is reviewed for the availability of multiple readings of ambiguous sentences that support distributive and collective interpretations, and the constrained interpretation of sentences arising from the lexical semantics of a universal quantifier, a predicate (adjective), an adverbial modifier, a determiner, or quantification scope. Off-line tasks with child and adult participants reveal a developmental comparison in the availability of these readings and the predication of individuals and groups of individuals, while on-line processing tasks with adults provide fine-grained behavioural evidence for the role of lexical and structural factors in facilitating or suppressing such readings.

Metaphor

Metaphors are pervasive in literature and everyday speech. This chapter explores how metaphors are interpreted both by adults and by children. It reviews recent findings and directions of research on four main issues: What is the relation between figurative and literal meaning in metaphor processing? How is the metaphorical meaning arrived at and which factors are at play in the interpretative process? What are the differences and similarities in processing between different types of metaphors and between metaphors and other tropes? How does metaphor comprehension develop through childhood? The chapter concludes with a few fairly clear answers the psycholinguistic literature has provided and a lot of open questions to be investigated in future research.