Summary Details
| Query: |
English Judgments on the Meaning of 'other'
|
|
| Author: | Oystein Nilsen | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
General Linguistics
|
|
| Summary: |
This is a summary of the query posted here:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/18/18-217.html#1 We received 74 completed forms, 9 of which we excluded from consideration (we excluded forms where sentences 22 and 26 were judged 'good') thus leaving us with 65 completed forms. This happened within about 24 hours after the form appeared on the linguist list. We are deeply grateful to all those who responded, and also quite surprised at how effective this way of gathering judgments turned out to be. There were three conditions, each with two or more variables. First, we tested bound readings of 'other' with a variety of different quantifiers as binders, i.e. quantifiers headed by 'no,' 'all,' 'every,' 'the,' 'and,' 'two,' and 'most.' Secondly, we tested whether bound readings of 'other' are sensitive to syntactic locality. We tested clausmate binding, cases where the binder and 'other' were separated by a finite clause boundary, a 'small clause' (ECM) boundary, or by a factive island. Finally, we tested whether there is an effect on the availability of bound readings of the presence/absence of a noun following 'other' (i.e. 'the others' vs. 'the other students'). A table summarizing all our findings can be downloaded here: http://www.let.uu.nl/~Oystein.Nilsen/personal/quest.xls.pdf and the original form (no longer active) can be found here: http://www.let.uu.nl/~Oystein.Nilsen/personal/judgments.html Some of the effects turned out not to be significant. For example, sentences in the clause mate binding configuration, with 'the' as the head of the binder were accepted by 22% when 'other' was not followed by a noun, and 34% of the time when it was. But this difference was not significant (s=.1). We have not completed significance testing of all the pairs we'd like to, but when we have, we'll post it where the table can be found now. If somebody is interested in the raw material, we can email it to them if they contact us. We received several comments, not all of which we can respond to here. One recurrent remark was that sentences with 'most' are infelicitous in a context that only has three individuals. We are planning a follow-up study where we repair this defect. Another frequent remark was that the word ''felicitous'' is somewhat unfortunate. In our follow-up study, we will use locutions like 'make sense' instead. A third point with which we also agree, is that the GOOD/BAD dichotomy is too coarse for some of these judgments. Hence we are planning to have more gradients in our follow-up study. This will also give us more statistical power, and potentially lead to more significant findings. Best regards, Jakub Dotlacil and Øystein Nilsen |
|
| LL Issue: | 18.688 | |
| Date Posted: | 06-Mar-2007 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
|
Back |
||
|
|
||
|
Sums main page
|
||
|
About LINGUIST
|
Contact Us
|
Report Broken Link
While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents. |
|
