Sticky situations: 'Force' and quantifier domains
When do we judge that someone was forced to do what they did? One relatively well-established finding is that subjects tend to judge that agents were not forced to do actions when those actions violate norms. A surprising discovery of Young and Phillips 2011 is that this effect seems to disappear wh...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Conference item |
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Linguistic Society of America
2018
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| _version_ | 1797082203869413376 |
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| author | Mandelkern, M Phillips, J |
| author_facet | Mandelkern, M Phillips, J |
| author_sort | Mandelkern, M |
| collection | OXFORD |
| description | When do we judge that someone was forced to do what they did? One relatively well-established finding is that subjects tend to judge that agents were not forced to do actions when those actions violate norms. A surprising discovery of Young and Phillips 2011 is that this effect seems to disappear when we frame the relevant ‘force’-claim in the active rather than passive voice ('X forced Y to φ' vs. 'Y was forced to φ by X'). Young and Phillips found a similar contrast when the scenario itself shifts attention from Y (the forcee) to X (the forcer). We propose that these effects can be (at least partly) explained by way of the role of attention in the setting of quantifier domains which in turn play a role in the evaluation of ‘force’- claims. We argue for this hypothesis by way of an experiment which shows that sequences of active vs. passive ‘force’-claims display the characteristic “stickiness” of quantifier domain expansion, using a paradigm which we argue provides a useful general paradigm for testing quantifier domain hypotheses. Finally, we sketch a semantics for ‘force’ which we argue is suitable for capturing these effects. |
| first_indexed | 2024-03-07T01:24:54Z |
| format | Conference item |
| id | oxford-uuid:91a36340-ef22-476c-b148-c6859a0d6531 |
| institution | University of Oxford |
| last_indexed | 2024-03-07T01:24:54Z |
| publishDate | 2018 |
| publisher | Linguistic Society of America |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | oxford-uuid:91a36340-ef22-476c-b148-c6859a0d65312022-03-26T23:20:00ZSticky situations: 'Force' and quantifier domainsConference itemhttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_5794uuid:91a36340-ef22-476c-b148-c6859a0d6531Symplectic Elements at OxfordLinguistic Society of America2018Mandelkern, MPhillips, JWhen do we judge that someone was forced to do what they did? One relatively well-established finding is that subjects tend to judge that agents were not forced to do actions when those actions violate norms. A surprising discovery of Young and Phillips 2011 is that this effect seems to disappear when we frame the relevant ‘force’-claim in the active rather than passive voice ('X forced Y to φ' vs. 'Y was forced to φ by X'). Young and Phillips found a similar contrast when the scenario itself shifts attention from Y (the forcee) to X (the forcer). We propose that these effects can be (at least partly) explained by way of the role of attention in the setting of quantifier domains which in turn play a role in the evaluation of ‘force’- claims. We argue for this hypothesis by way of an experiment which shows that sequences of active vs. passive ‘force’-claims display the characteristic “stickiness” of quantifier domain expansion, using a paradigm which we argue provides a useful general paradigm for testing quantifier domain hypotheses. Finally, we sketch a semantics for ‘force’ which we argue is suitable for capturing these effects. |
| spellingShingle | Mandelkern, M Phillips, J Sticky situations: 'Force' and quantifier domains |
| title | Sticky situations: 'Force' and quantifier domains |
| title_full | Sticky situations: 'Force' and quantifier domains |
| title_fullStr | Sticky situations: 'Force' and quantifier domains |
| title_full_unstemmed | Sticky situations: 'Force' and quantifier domains |
| title_short | Sticky situations: 'Force' and quantifier domains |
| title_sort | sticky situations force and quantifier domains |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT mandelkernm stickysituationsforceandquantifierdomains AT phillipsj stickysituationsforceandquantifierdomains |