13 March 2020, Cool Logic, Flavia Nährlich

Certain comparative sentences like "More people have been to Russia than I have." are known as so-called comparative illusions. Native speakers of English judge these statements as acceptable, i.e. report that they are proper English sentences with a coherent interpretation. However, it turns out that people struggle to articulate that interpretation. In fact, it is not clear at all if there is a coherent meaning that we can assign or where the illusion of grammatical correctness originates from. This challenges some of our most basic assumptions about language architecture, like that we perceive sentences veridically, interpret them fully and that sentence form and meaning are tightly coupled. During the talk, I will present a possible solution for all these problems, the category mismatch hypothesis, I developed based on existing experimental data and some German examples.