Choosing ways of expressing quantities
Tony Sanford, Dept of Psychology,
University of Glasgow
Wednesday Jan 21st
There is considerable practical debate about the best way of presenting
risk, probability and other sorts of quantity information. There is also
a large literature on the semantics, pragmatics, and (now) psychology of
quantifiers and related expressions. In this talk, I shall claim that the
presentation of this type of information can never be in a "neutral" form,
and that its presentation is inevitably associated with perspective and
presuppositional phenomena that have real communicative significance.
I shall illustrate these claims and sketch a picture of the main constraint
s on expression selection, mainly through psychological experimentation.
Throughout I shall orient the observations to problems in the production
of appropriate nominal expressions.