The Role of Prior Belief and the QUD in Exhaustivity Inference

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: Over the course of a linguistic exchange, listeners must recover what a speaker means by an utterance, a task that at times requires enrichment of the utterance beyond what is given by semantics alone. In one such inference, exhaustivity inference, a speaker’s utterance is taken to be an exhaustive answer to some mutually known question. This thesis examines the role of context – specifically, the Question Under Discussion – and world knowledge in the form of subjective prior beliefs in exhaustivity inference. The results of two experiments show that listeners incorporate their relevant prior beliefs when drawing an exhaustivity inference. Furthermore, a model of a pragmatic listener in the Rational Speech Act framework whose rationality parameter is inferred from empirical data makes predictions about the likelihood of exhaustive interpretation that resemble those elicited from human participants. Taken together, these results suggest that exhaustivity is a phenomenon dependent on world knowledge, which RSA provides a principled explanation for.

Type of resource	text
Date created	June 5, 2019

Author	Javangula, Pratyusha Rajeswari
Degree granting institution	Stanford University, Department of Symbolic Systems
Primary advisor	Degen, Judith
Advisor	Potts, Christopher

Subject	experimental pragmatics
Subject	Question Under Discussion
Subject	Rational Speech Acts Framework
Subject	exhaustivity
Subject	Department of Symbolic Systems
Genre	Thesis

Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/sz315yg4991

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Preferred Citation: Javangula, Pratyusha Rajeswari and Degen, Judith and Potts, Christopher. (2019). The Role of Prior Belief and the QUD in Exhaustivity Inference. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/sz315yg4991

Master's Theses, Symbolic Systems Program, Stanford University

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