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Experimenting with the king of France: Topics, verifiability and definite descriptions

What it is about

Sentences with an empty definite description, such as "The king of France is bald", have been argued to get different truth-value judgments depending on context. The authors test this with a trivia-quiz experiment. Thirty-three native English speakers judged TRUE, FALSE or CAN'T SAY for 88 critical items spread over eleven conditions, plus fillers and controls. Positive sentences were judged FALSE almost always (about 78% in the baseline condition, under 20% CAN'T SAY). Negated sentences gave more TRUE answers when another, referentially sound entity was present (about 46% to 72%, against 21% in the negative baseline) and when that entity was known to the speaker. Topicality had a smaller effect, visible only in the negative conditions. The authors conclude that verifiability is the main factor and topicality follows from it.

Ideas

For Mova

The chapter is 33. Implicature and presupposition, with 35. Reference and coreference for the definite descriptions. The code is prag/src/frames.rs (frames) and coref/src/mention.rs (mentions that can serve as antecedents). Measure: the TRUE, FALSE and CAN'T SAY split on a list of Mova-built items in the paper's condition types, with the reason logged. Build a new item list rather than copy the paper's items.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3765/sp.6.10

@article{abrusan2013experimenting,
  title = {{Experimenting with the king of France: Topics, verifiability and definite descriptions}},
  author = {Abrusán, Márta and Szendrői, Kriszta},
  journal = {Semantics and Pragmatics},
  year = {2013},
  doi = {10.3765/sp.6.10},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.6.10}
}

References

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