PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

According to a recent proposal, so-called empty-set (ES) quantifiers areextraordinarilydifficult to interpret because their verification algorithm involves one specific rule intendedto handle ES situations. The rule relies on the explicit representation of objects in therestrictor set that are not in the scope set. This type of encoding isassumed to becogni-tively costly because the cognitive system is tuned to encodingthe presence of propertiesrather than their absence, a strategy viable for non-ES quantifiers but doom to failurefor ES quantifiers. Whilepreviousdata support this assumption, theydo notrule out thepossibility that the observed ES effects were at least in part due to a superficial mismatchbetween the visual contexts and the content words in the tested sentences. We report on apicture verification experiment in which we combined ES quantifierswithGermanaußer-(‘besides’)-phrases to investigate how the additive inference, triggered byaußer, interactswith ES effects. Our results indicate that ES effects are in fact based on compositionalmeaning and cannot be explained based on superficial features of the stimuli alone.