The Semantics and Processing of Distributivity

On April 26, Jakub Dotlacil presented recent and ongoing work with Adrian Brasoveanu on the semantics and processing of distributivity, reporting the results of 3 eye-tracking experiments that investigated:

1. whether distributive vs. collective readings for plural definites are a matter of ambiguity or vagueness (building on previous work by Frazier et al, 1999); and if the contrast is a matter of ambiguity, which reading is the default one (if any)
2. the contrast between semantic and pragmatic biases in the interpretation of plural definites
3. the contrast between quantificational / scopal distributivity (e.g., the floating quantifier “each”) and lexical distributivity (e.g., “tall” is a lexically distributive predicate)

The slides are available here.