Denials as a window into semantic and world knowledge violations

Abstract

A long-standing challenge in semantics concerns the boundary between semantic anomaly – understood as a violation of linguistically encoded selectional restrictions – and statements that are semantically well-formed but false given world knowledge. This paper proposes a novel approach that starts from the assumption that semantic knowledge and world knowledge differ in the roles they play within the Common Ground. Specifically, we argue that they differ with respect to their potential at-issueness. Whereas semantic restrictions are, by their very nature, non-at-issue, world knowledge may be either at-issue or non-at-issue. We exploit this difference to further explore the dividing line between semantic and world knowledge. Treating denials as a window into this distinction, we derive two diagnostics that are both grounded in speakers’ use of denial: the FALSUM Test and the “Wait a Minute!” Test. Both tests show that denials and related ways of challenging an utterance are available only for world knowledge violations, but not for semantic violations. The diagnostics converge in their results and successfully classify not only clear cases of category mismatch, but also more controversial borderline cases. Two judgment studies provide empirical support for the proposed approach. Overall, our findings offer a principled step toward delineating semantic well-formedness from semantic anomaly.