Something from nothing: pragmatic parsing of partitive possessives∗

Sentence structure is often ambiguous. Models of human parsing typically assume that such ambiguity is resolved through cues that are present in the signal (Elman et al., 2004). Here, I present experimental evidence that the absence of an overt cue can be meaningful for resolving parsing ambiguities, based on a freeform selection task with partitive possessives, which exhibit morphophonological alternation (Nevins, 2011). This result is parallel to the use of negative evidence in tasks like reference (Frank and Goodman, 2012; Stiller et al., 2015), which is motivated by pragmatic principles (Grice, 1975; Levinson, 2000), and I argue that it cannot readily be explained by a parser which does not incorporate such principles. ∗Advising committee: Chris Potts (chair), Vera Gribanova, and Boris Horizanov. I’d like to thank these advisors and all others who contributed to aspects of this work.