The Meaning of ‘Most’: Semantics, Numerosity and Psychology

The meaning of 'most' can be described in many ways. We offer a framework for distinguishing semantic descriptions, interpreted as psychological hypotheses that go beyond claims about sentential truth conditions, and an experiment that tells against an attractive idea: 'most' is understood in terms of one-to-one correspondence. Adults evaluated 'Most of the dots are yellow', as true or false, on many trials in which yellow dots and blue dots were displayed for 200 ms. Displays manipulated the ease of using a 'one-to-one with remainder' strategy, and a strategy of using the Approximate Number System to compare of (approximations of) cardinalities. Interpreting such data requires care in thinking about how meaning is related to verification. But the results suggest that 'most' is understood in terms of cardinality comparison, even when counting is impossible. How is the word 'most' related to human capacities for detecting and comparing numerosities? One might think the answer is obvious, and explicit in standard semantic theories: 'most' is understood in terms of a capacity to compare cardinal numbers; e.g. 'Most of the dots are yellow' means that the number of yellow dots is greater than the number of nonyellow dots. But there are other possibilities for how competent speakers understand 'most', and we offer experimental evidence that tells against some initially attractive hypotheses. By discussing one lexical item in this way, we hope to illustrate how semantics and psychology can and should be pursued in tandem, especially with regard to the capacities that let humans become numerate. Following common practice in semantics, we begin by characterizing the contribution of 'most' to the truth conditions of sentences that have the following form: Most (of the)� sa re� . At this level of analysis, there are many equivalent characterizations, as discussed below. Our aim is to give some of these formal distinctions empirical bite, in a way that permits adjudication of distinct hypotheses about how speakers understand 'most' (cf. Hackl, 2009). In short, we want to know how speakers represent the truth conditions in question.