Chao Sun joined XPrag.de as fellow at ZAS Berlin!

This month, the next fellow of our 2018 internship program joined XPrag.de. Chao Sun from UCL is working with Uli Sauerland and Bob van Tiel in the project “MUQTASP” at ZAS Berlin. The title of her project there is “Online examination of focal ranges associated with quantifying expressions”. How is Chao herself describing the project? Chao: “Quantifying expressions have focal ranges that are independent from the pragmatic inferences. For example, given a statement like “Some of the As are Bs” in a context where the cardinality of the intersection set is ranging from 0 to 10, a hearer would associate ‘some’ with the range below half but above two. In this project, we aim to show that these focal ranges are relevant for experimental research into the online processing of quantifying expressions. In my PhD thesis, I have demonstrated that prior expectations about the set size associated with ‘some’ and ‘all’ influence anticipatory looks during online interpretation of scalar quantifiers. Thus, in this project, we will conduct another eye-tracking experiment to extend the scope of investigation to other quantifying expressions, in particular ‘most’, which implies ‘not all’, and ‘few’, which implies ‘not none’.”