FROMANNUAL REVIEWS

CogSci 2025

•

August 01, 2025

•

San Francisco, United States

keywords:

semantics of language

language comprehension

language production

linguistics

pragmatics

Prominent U.S. legal cases have turned on the resolution of linguistic ambiguities that arise from interactions between negation and coordination. Negative disjunction sentences (ND, “John didn’t buy cake or cookies”) are ambiguous between two readings: a neither-nor reading and a not-both reading. Negative conjunction (NC, “John didn’t buy cake and cookies”) is similarly ambiguous. Experimental findings on such scope ambiguities (Jasbi et al. 2023, Tobia et al. 2023) suggest that in general, listeners favor the neither-nor reading for ND but are less biased in their interpretations of NC. We present a corpus analysis with researcher annotations of several hundred tokens of these constructions in English treebank data. Initial results are consistent with previous conclusions based on controlled experimental data, suggesting that an attested tendency in linguistic comprehension is also reflected in naturalistic production. Our dataset can further be used to explore factors that modulate the disambiguation in context.

Downloads

Paper

Next from CogSci 2025

Listener Trade-Offs between Acoustics and Semantics in Noisy Speech
poster

Listener Trade-Offs between Acoustics and Semantics in Noisy Speech

CogSci 2025

Anna Westwig and 2 other authors

01 August 2025

Similar lecture

Scope Ambiguities in Large Language Models
poster

Scope Ambiguities in Large Language Models

NAACL 2024

Siva Reddy
+1
Gaurav Kamath and 3 other authors

17 June 2024

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

Select topic of interest (you can select more than one)

PRESENTATIONS

  • All Presentations
  • For Librarians
  • Resource Center
  • Free Trial
Underline Science, Inc.
1216 Broadway, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10001, USA

© 2026 Underline - All rights reserved

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.