ID - 78501840 TI - On the pragmatics of numeral modifiers : the availability and time course of variation, ignorance and indifference inferences. PY - 2018 SN - 9789460932939 9460932932 PB - Utrecht LOT, Netherlands Graduate School DB - UniCat KW - Grammar KW - Pragmatics KW - Psycholinguistics KW - 801.56 KW - 801.56 Syntaxis. Semantiek KW - Syntaxis. Semantiek KW - Theses UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:78501840 AB - Languages have a quite large inventory of expressions to refer to an imprecise quantity such as n ? 4. In English, for instance, this quantity can be described by the expressions '4 or more', 'at least 4', 'more than 3', 'minimally 4', 'over 3', etc. Do these expressions actually convey the exact same meaning? No. Some of them, i.e., 'at least 4', '4 or more', 'minimally 4' (vs. 'more than 3', 'over 3'), have been found to additionally convey speaker ignorance effects and these effects are pragmatic in nature. This dissertation probes experimentally speaker ignorance effects as well as two other types of meaning, i.e., variation effects and speaker indifference effects, by looking at the off-line and the real-time comprehension of utterances with two distinct kinds of numeral modifiers, represented by 'at least' and 'more than'. The aim is to find out where one should draw the dividing line between the core meaning and the pragmatic meaning of each kind of modifiers, and how different these two are, with a main focus on their pragmatics. ER -