Influences Of Reference Standards On The Interpretation And Use Of Vague Quantifiers

Vague quantifiers,including quantifiers of frequency(e.g.often,sometimes)and quantifiers of number/amount(e.g.little,many),are a class of expressions frequently and widely used in daily communication.They serve to denote certain quantity,which is not explicit and makes them inherently vague.This study summarized four types of reference standards,namely intra-individual average level,inter-individual average level,limit value and subjective expectation,and conducted several experiments to investigate their effects on the use and interpretation of vague quantifiers.Experiment 1 was designed to testify whether participants’ use of vague quantifiers would vary along with the change of four types of reference standards.Experiment 2 initially explored the condition when more than one reference standards available simultaneously.Thereinto,Experiment 2(a)provided participants the information of subjective expectation and another reference standard to figure out whether they would prefer to refer to subjective expectation rather than another reference standard.Experiment 2(b)demanded participants to choose proper vague quantifiers and then asked them which reference standard they thought they had used.Experiment 3(a)and Experiment 3(b)proved the disadvantages of vague quantifiers being used as response options in questionnaires due to the property of vagueness.The experiment results revealed: 1)four types of reference standards all exerted significant influence on the use of vague quantifiers;2)when given subjective expectation and another reference standard in the question stems,subjective expectation took priority over intra-individual average level and inter-individual average level,but limit value was referred to in preference to subjective expectation;when no reference information was given in the task,significantly more participants thought they had used intra-individual average level as reference standard rather than limit value or subjective expectation.Furthermore,over half of participants thought they had used more than one reference standard;3)for both types of quantifiers,different participants had different interpretations of the same vague quantifier,and the same participant even had different interpretations of the same vague quantifier when it was used in different contexts.The current findings indicated that the quantities denoted by vague quantifiers were quite inexplicit,hence the interpretation and use of vague quantifiers indeed rely on four types of reference standards.Due to the difference in social environment,personal experiences and specific contexts,these reference standards differ between people and contexts,which results in people’s different interpretations of the same vague quantifier and the same individual’s different interpretations of the same vague quantifier used in different contexts.Hopefully,for those questionnaires which use vague quantifiers as response options,this research could provide some inspirations for the design of tasks and the interpretation of results.In addition,the current findings not only are meaningful in the field of quantifiers,but can be applied to many domains,including natural language processing,AI(artificial intelligence),financial decision making and so on.