Journal of Semantics Advance Access originally published online on October 9, 2007
Journal of Semantics 2007 24(4):331-343; doi:10.1093/jos/ffm012
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The Psychological Reality of Classical Quantifier Entailment Properties
Institut Jean Nicod–CNRS
Correspondence: GUY POLITZER, Institut Jean Nicod–CNRS Ecole Normale Supérieure, 29 rue d'Ulm, Paris 75005 France. e-mail: politzer{at}univ-paris8.fr
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Abstract |
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A test of directional entailment properties of classical quantifiers defined by the theory of generalized quantifiers (Barwise & Cooper 1981) is described. Participants had to solve a task which consisted of four kinds of inference. In the first one, the premise was of the form ‘Q–hyponym–verb–blank predicate’, where Q is a classical quantifier (e.g. ‘Some cats are [ ]’), and the question was to indicate what, if anything, can be concluded by filling the slots in ‘...–hyperonym–verb–blank predicate’ (e.g. ‘... animals are [ ]’). The second kind of inference was the same, except that the hyperonym was in the premise and the hyponym in the conclusion. The third and fourth kinds of inference differed from the first two by the position of the hyperonym (respectively hyponym) which occupied the place of the predicate (e.g. ‘some [ ] are animals’). It was observed that if the directional entailment holds people respond accordingly in most cases and that if the entailment does not hold they correctly fail to produce it. These results provide elementary, but essential empirical support to this semantic approach to quantification, and are a prerequisite for its application to the study of reasoning with quantifiers. The implications for the psychology of reasoning are discussed.
Received for publication 1 August 2006. Accepted for publication 5 November 2006.