{"id":3723,"date":"2019-02-18T09:08:54","date_gmt":"2019-02-18T08:08:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/projects.illc.uva.nl\/lgc\/seminar\/?p=3723"},"modified":"2019-04-15T20:56:51","modified_gmt":"2019-04-15T18:56:51","slug":"lira-session-kees-van-deemter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/projects.illc.uva.nl\/lgc\/seminar\/2019\/02\/lira-session-kees-van-deemter\/","title":{"rendered":"LIRa Session: Kees van Deemter"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.uu.nl\/medewerkers\/CJvanDeemter\/Profiel\">Kees van Deemter<\/a>\u00a0(Utrecht University and University of Aberdeen)<\/p>\n<p>Date and Time: Thursday, April&nbsp;25th 2019, 16:30-18:00<\/p>\n<p>Venue: ILLC Seminar Room F1.15, Science Park 107.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Title:\u00a0<b>The Elusive Benefits of Vagueness<\/b>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>Abstract.<\/em> Much of everyday language is vague, yet the benefits of vagueness for\u00a0hearers and readers are proving to be elusive. We discuss a range of earlier controlled\u00a0experiments with human participants, and we report on a new series of experiments\u00a0that we conducted in recent years. These new experiments, which focus\u00a0on strategic use of vague expressions that are part of referential noun phrases, aim to separate the\u00a0utility of vagueness (defined by the existence of borderline cases, as is common\u00a0in theoretical work) from other factors that tend to co-occur\u00a0with vagueness. Having presented the evidence, we argue that the evidence\u00a0supports a view of vagueness where the benefits of vague terms are due\u00a0to other influences, rather than to vagueness itself. These factors include: low granularity;\u00a0the use of evaluative words; the avoidance of overtly numerical words; the\u00a0existence of comparison strategies; and, lastly and more tentatively, a phenomenon\u00a0that we call range reduction. Although it is possible that other types of vague expressions (i.e., outside referential noun phrases) behave differently, our\u00a0work suggests that vagueness itself may not increase the utility of an expression at all.<\/p>\n<div><span style=\"color: #000000;\">This is joint work with Matthew Green (Bournemouth University).<\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker: Kees van Deemter\u00a0(Utrecht University and University of Aberdeen)<br \/>\nDate and Time: Thursday, April&nbsp;25th 2019, 16:30-18:00<br \/>\nVenue: ILLC Seminar Room F1.15, Science Park 107.<br \/>\nTitle:\u00a0The Elusive Benefits of Vagueness.<br \/>\nAbstract. Much of everyday language is vague, yet the benefits of vagueness for\u00a0hearers and readers are proving to be elusive. We discuss a range of earlier controlled\u00a0experiments with human participants, [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.illc.uva.nl\/lgc\/seminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.illc.uva.nl\/lgc\/seminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.illc.uva.nl\/lgc\/seminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.illc.uva.nl\/lgc\/seminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.illc.uva.nl\/lgc\/seminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3723"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/projects.illc.uva.nl\/lgc\/seminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3723\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3795,"href":"https:\/\/projects.illc.uva.nl\/lgc\/seminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3723\/revisions\/3795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.illc.uva.nl\/lgc\/seminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.illc.uva.nl\/lgc\/seminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.illc.uva.nl\/lgc\/seminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}