The pragmatics of exhaustivity in embedded questions: an experimental comparison of know and predict in German and English

Frontiers in Psychology

Psychology

Emilie Destruel¹  Lea Fricke²  Edgar Onea³  Malte Zimmermann⁴ 

[1] Department of French and Italian, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, United States;Department of German Studies, University of Bochum, Bochum, Germany;Department of German Studies, University of Graz, Graz, Austria;Department of Linguistics, Universität Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany;

关键词: experimental pragmatics;    embedded questions;    exhaustivity;    probabilistic modeling;    English;    German;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1148275

 received in 2023-01-19, accepted in 2023-07-28,  发布年份 2023

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

IntroductionWe present a cross-linguistic experimental study that explores the exhaustivity properties of questions embedded under wissen/to know and korrekt vorhersagen/to correctly predict in German and English. While past theoretical literature has held that such embedded questions should only be interpreted as strongly exhaustive (SE), recent experimental findings suggest an intermediate exhaustive (IE) interpretation is also available and plausible.MethodsParticipants were confronted with a decision problem involving the different exhaustive readings and received a financial incentive based on their performance. We employed Bayesian analysis to create probabilistic models of participants' beliefs, linking their responses to readings based on utility maximization in simple decision problems.ResultsFor wissen/to know, we found that the SE reading was most probable in both languages, aligning with early theoretical literature. However, we also attested to the presence of IE readings. For korrekt vorhersagen in German, the IE reading was most probable, whereas for the English phrase "to correctly predict," a preference for the SE reading was observed.DiscussionThis cross-linguistic variation correlates with independent corpus data, indicating that German vorhersagen and English to predict are not lexically equivalent. By including an explicit pragmatic component, our study complements previous work that has focused solely on the principled semantic availability of given readings.

【 授权许可】

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Copyright © 2023 Fricke, Destruel, Zimmermann and Onea.