Real-Time Commitments in Processing Individual/Degree Polysemy

Abstract

Individual/degree polysemy is a phenomenon in which individual-denoting Determiner Phrases of any type can, in certain contexts, denote a degree corresponding to some salient measure of that individual. Like deferred reference, individual/degree polysemy conditions agreement: compare Four pizzas are vegetarian to Four pizzas is more than Sue had asked for. In this paper, we test whether readers commit to a single meaning of potentially polysemous DPs during real-time sentence processing. Immediate commitments have been found for other cases of grammatical ambiguity, for example collective or distributive uses of verbs, whereas readers do not necessarily commit to one sense of a lexically polysemous element (e.g., the concrete or abstract sense of newspaper). We present the results of one study of eye movements during reading and one self-paced reading study. Our results provide evidence that there are immediate commitments to the individual sense and the degree sense, depending on the internal properties of the Determiner Phrase. In particular, there is some evidence that definite DPs like the pizzas have a commitment to an individual interpretation, and stronger evidence that numeral DPs like two pizzas have a commitment to a degree interpretation. We discuss our results in light of the Minimal Semantic Commitment hypothesis proposed by Frazier, Pacht and Rayner.