Mankowitz Poppy
University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom.
Nat Lang Semant. 2023;31(4):349-387. doi: 10.1007/s11050-023-09211-2. Epub 2023 Oct 26.
The standard contemporary semantics for 'every' predict the truth of occurrences of sentences with restrictors that denote the empty set, such as 'Every American king lives in New York'. The literature on empty restrictors has been concerned with explaining a particular violation of this prediction: many assessors consider empty-restrictor sentences to be odd rather than valued, and they are apparently more likely to do so when such sentences include determiners like 'every' as opposed to those like 'no'. Empirical investigation of this issue is overdue, and I present the results of three experimental surveys. The first unexpected outcome is that there is no evidence of a contrast in assessors' tendencies to judge sentences to be odd based on determiner type. An additional surprising result is that those assessors who assign a truth value to sentences where 'every' combines with an empty restrictor overwhelmingly assign the value false. The full results do not fit straightforwardly with any existing account.
当代对于“每一个”的标准语义学预测，带有表示空集的限定词的句子，如“每一位美国国王都住在纽约”，其出现的情况为真。关于空限定词的文献一直致力于解释对这一预测的一种特殊违背：许多评估者认为空限定词句子很奇怪而非有价值，而且当这类句子包含像“每一个”这样的限定词而非像“没有”这样的限定词时，他们显然更有可能这样认为。对这个问题的实证研究早就该进行了，我展示了三项实验调查的结果。第一个意外结果是，没有证据表明评估者基于限定词类型判断句子是否奇怪的倾向存在差异。另一个令人惊讶的结果是，那些给“每一个”与空限定词组合的句子赋予真值的评估者绝大多数赋予的真值为假。完整的结果与任何现有的解释都不完全相符。
