Are 'most' and 'more than half' truth-conditionally equivalent?
Milica Denić, Jakub Szymanik
October 2021 

Quantifying determiners 'most' and 'more than half' are standardly assumed to have the same truth-conditional meaning. Much work builds on this assumption in studying how the two quantifiers are mentally encoded and processed (Hackl, 2009; Pietroski et al., 2009; Szymanik and Zajenkowski, 2010; Lidz et al., 2011; Steinert-Threlkeld et al., 2015; Talmina et al., 2017). There is however empirical evidence that 'most' is sometimes interpreted as 'significantly more than half' (Ariel, 2003, 2004; Solt, 2011, 2016; Ramotowska et al., 2020). Is this difference between 'most' and 'more than half' a consequence of pragmatic strengthening of 'most', or is the standard assumption that the two quantifiers are truth-conditionally equivalent wrong? We report two experiments which demonstrate that 'most' preserves the 'significantly more than half' interpretation in downward-entailing environments, which speaks against the pragmatic strengthening option and in favor of there being a difference between the two quantifiers at the level of truth conditions.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005570 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Journal of Semantics
keywords:	quantification, implicatures, experimental semantics, most, more than half, semantics
previous versions:	v1 [November 2020]
Downloaded:	1106 times

 

[ edit this article | back to article list ]