Experimental investigations of ambiguity : The case of most

In the study of natural language quantification, much recent attention has been devoted to the investigation of verification procedures associated with the proportional quantifier most (e.g. Hackl, 2009; Lidz, Pietroski, Hunter and Halberda, 2011; Solt, 2011; Kotek, Sudo, Howard and Hackl, 2011; Pietroski, Lidz, Hunter, Odic and Halberda, 2012; Kotek, Sudo, Howard and Hackl, 2012). The aim of these studies is to go beyond the traditional characterization of the semantics of most, which is confined to explicating its truth-functional and presuppositional content as well as its combinatorial properties, as these aspects underdetermine the correct analysis of most. The present paper contributes to this effort by presenting new experimental evidence in support of a decompositional analysis of most according to which it is a superlative construction built from a gradable predicate many or much and the superlative operator -est, (Hackl, 2009). Our evidence comes in the form of verification profiles for sentences like Most of the dots are blue which, we argue, reflect the existence of a superlative reading of most. This contrasts notably with Lidz et al.'s (2011) results. To reconcile the two sets of data, we argue, it is necessary to take important differences in the task demands into account, which impose limits on the conclusions that can be drawn based on these studies.