Kees van Deemter: The Utility of Vagueness: Does It Lie Elsewhere?
Title: The Utility of Vagueness: Does It Lie Elsewhere?
Speaker: Prof. Kees van Deemter (University of Aberdeen)
Date & Time : 8 October 2015 (Thursday), 14:00 – 16:00
Place: Seminar room 259, Main Teaching Building, Xixi campus, Zhejiang University
Natural language is known to be full of vague expressions, understood as expressions whose extension can have borderline cases. It has been hypothesised that vagueness is frequent because vague expressions are easy to process, and this hypothesis is the subject of my talk, which represents joint work with the psychologist Matt Green.
Focussing on the role of vagueness in utterances such as “click on the box with 15/many dots”, we ask whether (and if so why) hearers act more quickly when quantities are described vaguely. After a sequence of experiments, it is starting to become likely that vagueness itself does not make an utterance easy to process, but that vagueness is often associated with other factors (e.g., the avoidance of numbers; range reduction) that do have this effect.
