Vagueness, Presupposition and Truth-Value Judgments Jérémy Zehr To cite this version: Jérémy Zehr. Vagueness, Presupposition and Truth-Value Judgments. Linguistics. École Normale Supérieure de Paris, 2014. English. tel-01107532 HAL Id: tel-01107532 https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01107532 Submitted on 22 Jan 2015 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution| 4.0 International License Vagueness, Presupposition and Truth-Value Judgments J´er´emy Zehr Institut Jean Nicod, UMR 8128 Ecole´ Normale Sup´erieure de Paris Committee Members Paul Egr´e´ ∗, Orin Percus∗ Reinhard Muskens∗∗, Florian Schwarz∗∗ M´arta Abrus´an,Benjamin Spector A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor in Linguistics 18 December 2014 ∗Supervisors ∗∗Reviewers Contents 1 Introduction 3 1.1 IntroducingVagueness .......................... 4 1.2 IntroducingPresupposition. 8 1.3 The Project of Unifying Vagueness and Presupposition . ..... 12 1.3.1 PreviousM.A.Work ....................... 12 1.3.2 PresentWork ........................... 15 2 Trivalence, Vagueness and Presupposition 19 2.1 Supervaluationism ............................ 20 2.1.1 Presupposition: Van Fraassen’s Proposal . 22 2.1.2 Vagueness: Fine’simplementation . 27 2.2 StrongKleene............................... 29 2.2.1 Presupposition: George’s Implementation . .. 31 2.2.2 Vagueness: Tye’simplementation . 36 2.3 PredictionsandComparisons . 38 3 Experimental Literature on Vagueness and on Presupposition 47 3.1 Vagueness ................................. 48 3.2 Presupposition .............................. 51 3.3 Summary ................................. 57 4 ST5: a 5-Valued System 59 4.1 Truth-ValueJudgments. 60 4.2 ST5 .................................... 61 4.2.1 TheOriginal3-ValuedSTSystem . 61 4.2.1.1 TwoNotionsofSatisfaction . 61 4.2.1.2 NoRoomforPresupposition. 63 4.2.2 WhyExcludeAlternativeSystems. 63 4.2.3 TheST5System ......................... 65 i 4.3 HybridSentences ............................. 67 4.3.1 Conjunctions, Disjunctions and Implications in ST5 . ..... 67 4.3.1.1 AnExample ...................... 67 4.3.1.2 Left-RightAsymmetries . 68 4.3.2 DerivingPresuppositionsFromWords . 71 4.3.2.1 Presuppositional Expressions in Traditional Truth- ConditionalSemantics . 72 4.3.2.2 Presuppositional Expressions in ST5 . 74 4.4 Conclusions ................................ 82 5 Three Experiments 83 5.1 FirstExperiment:TestingST5 . 84 5.1.1 Design............................... 85 5.1.1.1 Predictions ....................... 88 5.1.2 Methods.............................. 91 5.1.2.1 Materials ........................ 91 5.1.2.2 ProcedureandParticipants . 91 5.1.3 Results............................... 92 5.1.4 Discussion............................. 92 5.1.4.1 Vagueness........................ 92 5.1.4.2 Presupposition . 94 5.2 Second Experiment: A 3-Response Paradigm . .. 99 5.2.1 Design............................... 99 5.2.1.1 Predictions . 100 5.2.2 Methods.............................. 102 5.2.2.1 Materials ........................ 102 5.2.2.2 ProcedureandParticipants . 102 5.2.3 Results............................... 103 5.2.4 Discussion............................. 105 5.3 Follow-Up Experiment: Investigating Participants’ Motivations for Presupposition .............................. 107 5.3.1 Design............................... 107 5.3.1.1 Predictions . 107 5.3.2 Methods.............................. 108 5.3.2.1 Materials ........................ 108 5.3.2.2 ProcedureandParticipants . 108 ii 5.3.3 Results............................... 109 5.3.4 Discussion............................. 111 5.4 Conclusions ................................ 112 5.4.1 ExperimentalConsiderations. 112 5.4.2 TheoreticalConsiderations . 113 6 4-Valued Systems for Vagueness and Presupposition 115 6.1 ABi-Lattice................................ 116 6.1.1 P asanAbsorbingTruth-Value . 119 6.2 TheRepairStrategy ........................... 121 6.2.1 WeakKleeneandStrongKleene. 121 6.2.2 MergingWeakandStrongKleene . 122 6.2.3 MergingStrongandMiddleKleene . 124 6.3 ConclusionsandComparisonwithST5 . 129 7 Antonyms 132 7.1 BorderlineContradictions . 132 7.2 TwoConceptionsofAntonyms. 134 7.3 PilotExperiment ............................. 136 7.3.1 Design............................... 137 7.3.1.1 Predictions . 138 7.3.2 Methods.............................. 141 7.3.2.1 Possible Biases in the Adjectives’ and their Antonyms’ Features......................... 141 7.3.2.2 Materials ........................ 144 7.3.2.3 Procedure........................ 145 7.3.3 Results............................... 146 7.3.4 Discussion............................. 146 7.4 MainExperiment ............................. 150 7.4.1 Design............................... 150 7.4.1.1 Predictions . 150 7.4.2 Methods.............................. 151 7.4.2.1 Materials ........................ 151 7.4.2.2 Procedure........................ 152 7.4.3 Results............................... 152 7.4.4 Discussion............................. 153 iii 8 Conclusions 157 8.1 TheoreticalConclusions . 157 8.2 TheoreticalPerspectives . 159 8.3 EmpiricalConclusions . 160 8.4 ExperimentalPerspectives . 162 A Experiments on Vagueness and Presupposition 164 A.1 Experiment1 ............................... 164 A.1.1 Instructions ............................ 164 A.1.2 Materials ............................. 165 A.1.3 PracticeItem ........................... 166 A.2 Experiment2 ............................... 166 A.2.1 Instructions ............................ 166 A.2.2 Materials ............................. 167 A.2.3 TrialItems ............................ 167 B Experiment on Antonyms 169 B.1 Instructions ................................ 169 B.2 Materials ................................. 170 Bibliography 171 iv Acknowledgments I want to thank my supervisors, Paul Egr´eand Orin Percus, who spent so much time and effort supporting me prior to and during the last three years. They knew how to bring out the best in me. Their rigorous advice and their kind patience have been priceless. I am very grateful to Reinhard Muskens and Florian Schwarz for accepting to be my thesis reviewers. I am also grateful to the other members of my committee, M´arta Abrus´an and Benjamin Spector. My thanks also go to the members of my mid-thesis committee, Denis Bonnay and Nicholas Asher, for their helpful feedback, and to Philippe Schlenker for valuable advice and discussion. My gratitude goes to Benjamin Spector again and to Emmanuel Chemla too, for their availability and all the enriching discussions that we had together. This work has benefited from discussions with more people than I can name. Among these people are the participants of the ESSLLI 2012 Workshop on Trivalent Logic and Their Applications, the participants of the Paris-Munich Workshop, and the participants of the Oxford-Princeton-IJN Workshop. I am especially thankful to John Burgess for his very helpful reviews. The Ph.D. students and the teachers that I met during my visiting quarter at UCLA contributed greatly to the early development of this thesis. I want to thank all of the members of the Linguistics Department for welcoming me and making my visit truly enjoyable. In particular, I owe a great deal to Heather Burnett for her personal and intellectual guidance, and to Dominique Sportiche for his help during these first months of my thesis. I would never have pursued this dissertation project without the encouragement and training that I received from the amazing teachers that I had at the University of Nantes. In particular, I am indebted to Orin Percus, Hamida Demirdache, and Nicolas Guilliot for introducing me to syntax and semantics. I would also like to thank my fellow graduate students; I am especially grateful to Nataˇsa Kneˇzevi´cfor 1 many stimulating discussions, and to Typhanie Prince for always providing moral support. This thesis would not have been possible without the administrative and financial support of the Institut Jean Nicod – Institut d’Etudes´ Cognitives at the Ecole´ Normale Sup´erieure. During my time at ENS, I also had the good fortune to meet many brilliant researchers from all over the world, including new friends whose presence and moral support have been essential to the completion of this thesis. My warmest thanks go to Bianca Cepollaro, Alexandre Cremers, Natasha Ivlieva, Jeremy Kuhn, Tristan Thommen, Lyn Tieu, and Erin Zaroukian for their precious feedback and advice, and for the invaluable moments of fun that we had together. My final thanks go to two important friends, Jean Balavoine and Jean Demel, and to my family, for supporting me day after day. This thesis has been granted by the Labex program “Frontiers in Cognition”. This work has been supported by ANR-10-LABX-0087 IEC and ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL; a part of this work was also supported by a ‘Euryi’ grant from the European Sci- ence Foundation (“Presupposition: A Formal Pragmatic Approach” to P. Schlenker). The ESF is not responsible for any claims made here. 2 Chapter 1 Introduction The day I