Language constructs as compatibility intervals: a small-scale experiment

Abstract

We conducted a small-scale experiment in which the respondents were asked to relate different language constructs (e.g. “possible”, “afterwards”, “seldom”) to numbers on a certain scale (e.g. surprisingness, time, frequency). We studied how the respondents expressed vagueness of the meaning using a numeric scale, examined how their answers related to scalar implicatures and questioned whether the meaning of vague constructs could be adequately modelled using compatibility intervals, a meaning representation (computational model) we recently proposed.