LingLunch : Ira Noveck

Ira Noveck (LLF)
Is there a difference between verbal expressions of number and symbolic ones?

This talk brings together two sets of literature, one on number cognition and the other on scalar implicature.  Both address questions about the semantic representation of number.  One debate in the number cognition literature concerns a claim that says numerosity is abstract, amodal, and approximate while providing the foundation for language-based exact readings.  Work emanating from the experimental pragmatic literature asks whether number is immediately represented as exact or results from an inference that refines, say, the upper bound of an individual number.  I will describe some of the studies behind these debates before showing how investigations from one literature could speak to the other.  I will  then present some recent work indicating that notation can impact the way we arrive at exact readings.  To wit, written-out numbers (e.g. the word "onze") are more prone to scalar-like enrichment than symbolic (e.g. "11") and oral (“onze”) presentations. This kind of finding represents a new challenge to both areas.