Documentation

Linglib.Studies.RitchieSchiller2024

[RS24a] — Default Domain Restriction Possibilities #

[RS24a] [CV95] [BJEST17] [Cla96] [Sta02]

Ritchie, K. & Schiller, H. (2024). Default Domain Restriction Possibilities. Semantics & Pragmatics 17, Article 13: 1–49.

The Argument #

When a speaker says "Every bottle is empty" at a dinner party, the hearer restricts the quantifier domain to contextually relevant bottles — not all bottles in the universe (R&S §1, ex. 3). Ritchie & Schiller argue that existing accounts fail to explain why certain restrictions are defaults:

Their positive proposal (§3): cognitive heuristics — perceptual availability, salience, and manipulability — generate a structured set of default domain restriction possibilities (DDRPs). These are grounded in spatial cognition, where nested spatial regions provide a natural ordering on candidate restrictions.

Scenario #

We construct an illustrative scenario (not from the paper) with 4 entities at increasing spatial distances and 3 world states, then verify key formal consequences of the DDRP framework for both ⟦every⟧ (↓MON) and ⟦some⟧ (↑MON).

Compositional Grounding #

Truth conditions derive from every_restricted / some_restricted (DomainRestriction.lean), which wrap every_sem / some_sem (Quantifier.lean) with a domain restrictor predicate. Nesting theorems derive from DDRP.every_nesting / DDRP.some_nesting, connecting the nested spatial regions to restrictor monotonicity.

RSA Connection #

While R&S argue against RSA as explaining default status (§2.1), DDRPs are compatible with RSA as the selection mechanism: the listener reasons over candidate DDRPs (the latent SpatialScale in the joint posterior) to infer which domain restriction the speaker intended. With a cognitive-default prior biasing toward peripersonal scales, the pragmatic listener's latent marginal infers the proximal restriction (§8). Predictions are checked by exact PMF evaluation on the RSA.Canonical pipeline.

Entities in the constructed scene: 4 bottles at increasing spatial distances.

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      A spatial scene: each entity occupies a spatial zone.

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        A spatial scene induces a DDRP: region s contains entities in zone ≤ s. Monotonicity and top-totality follow from the ordering on SpatialScale.

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          DDRP for the bottle scenario, derived from the spatial scene. Peripersonal ⊆ action ⊆ vista (= unrestricted in this indoor scene).

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            World states: which bottles are empty.

            • nearEmpty: only proximal bottles (b1, b2) are empty
            • midEmpty: proximal + action-space bottles (b1, b2, b3) are empty
            • allEmpty: all bottles are empty
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              def RitchieSchiller2024.instReprWorld.repr :
              WorldStd.Format
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                All entities are bottles in this scenario (trivial restrictor).

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                  Truth of "every bottle is empty" under a given spatial domain restriction. For all entities in the DDRP region that are bottles, they must be empty.

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                    Truth of "some bottle is empty" under a given spatial domain restriction. Some entity in the DDRP region that is a bottle must be empty.

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                      Proximal default: In the proximal world, only peripersonal restriction makes "every bottle is empty" true. The listener must infer the speaker intended the proximal domain — no other DDRP candidate works.

                      ↓MON/↑MON contrast: ⟦every⟧ and ⟦some⟧ react oppositely to domain restriction. In the proximal world, ⟦every⟧ is true only under peripersonal restriction (↓MON: smaller domain helps), while ⟦some⟧ is true under all restrictions (↑MON: larger domain never hurts).

                      ⟦every⟧ nesting (Prop level): truth under a larger scale entails truth under any smaller scale. Derives from DDRP.every_nesting via restrictor ↓MON.

                      ⟦some⟧ nesting (Prop level): truth under a smaller scale entails truth under any larger scale. Derives from DDRP.some_nesting via restrictor ↑MON.

                      [KL93] distinguish domain-precise from domain-vague quantificational restrictions. A DomainRestrictor is the degenerate domain-precise case: a single predicate, hence a single precisification — which is why DDRP-restricted every/no tolerate no exceptions via re-precisification.

                      Lift a DomainRestrictor into a trivially precise VagueRestriction: the singleton restriction with itself as the only precisification.

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                        A restrictor-based vague restriction is domain precise in [KL93]'s sense: one precisification, one domain.

                        Utterance type for the RSA model.

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                            R&S §3.2: Three cognitive heuristics collectively determine which domain restrictions are defaults. Each heuristic assigns a relevance score to a spatial scale, reflecting how well entities at that scale satisfy the corresponding cognitive criterion.

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                                Heuristic score for each (heuristic, scale) pair.

                                • Availability (R&S §3.2 ¶1): Peripersonal objects are maximally available — perceived without bodily distortion. Action/vista objects are available but require effort. Unrestricted objects may not be present at all.
                                • Salience (R&S §3.2 ¶2): Peripersonal and action-space objects are attention-grabbing. Vista/unrestricted objects are less noticeable.
                                • Manipulability (R&S §3.2 ¶3): Only peripersonal objects afford physical interaction (within arm's reach). All others are out of reach.
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                                  Each heuristic is anti-monotone: more proximal scales score at least as high. This captures R&S's claim that proximity enhances all three cognitive dimensions simultaneously.

                                  Latent prior derived from the three cognitive heuristics. The sum reflects R&S §3.2's conjunction: a good default restriction should score high on availability AND salience AND manipulability. The prior is unnormalized — RSA normalizes via the partition function.

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                                    The derived prior is anti-monotone: more proximal scales receive higher prior weight. Follows from anti-monotonicity of each heuristic.

                                    PMF face: shared speaker, cognitive-default vs uniform joint priors #

                                    The two listener variants below differ only in the latent prior, so they share one speaker: the literal listener is uniform on utteranceMeaning scale u's world extension, and the speaker normalises literal informativity over the two utterances (α = 1, no cost).

                                    Shared pragmatic speaker S(w, scale) ∝ L0(w | ·, scale) (α = 1, no cost).

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                                      Partition sums Z(w, scale) = Σ_u |ext(scale, u)|⁻¹ over the two utterances (extension cards — everyEmpty: peripersonal 3, action 2, vista 1; someEmpty: 3 at every scale): peripersonal 2/3 everywhere; action 1/3 at nearEmpty, else 5/6; vista 1/3 except 4/3 at allEmpty.

                                      Speaker-mass values S(w, scale) u (exact rationals): every — 1/2 at peripersonal, 3/5 at action (mid/all), 3/4 at vista (all), else 0; some — 1/2 at peripersonal, 1, 2/5, 2/5 at action, 1, 1, 1/4 at vista.

                                      Pooled world-sums of speaker mass per scale (the latent-comparison residues): every — peripersonal 3/2, action 6/5, vista 3/4; some — peripersonal 3/2, action 9/5, vista 9/4.

                                      Listeners #

                                      Cognitive-default joint prior: uniform over worlds (the constant world factor is absorbed by normalisation), ddprPrior over scales.

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                                        Pragmatic listener over the cognitive-default joint prior.

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                                          L1_latent peripersonal > action: The listener infers peripersonal as the most likely intended domain restriction, beating the action-space scale. This captures R&S's core claim: cognitive-default priors biasing toward proximal scales cause the listener to default to the nearest restriction.

                                          For "some bottle is empty", the cognitive-default prior overrides the semantic signal: peripersonal is inferred as the most likely scale despite ⟦some⟧ being true under all scales in all worlds. Without the prior, RSA predicts the WRONG ordering (see uniform_some_distal_wins).

                                          R&S §2.1 argue that RSA alone — without cognitive supplementation — cannot explain why certain domain restrictions are defaults. We verify this by constructing an RSA model with uniform latent priors and showing:

                                          1. For ⟦every⟧ (↓MON), RSA with uniform priors *happens* to predict
                                             peripersonal as most likely — but only because the literal semantics
                                             provides discriminative signal (it's false under wider scales in some
                                             worlds). This is not an explanation of default status.
                                          
                                          2. For ⟦some⟧ (↑MON), RSA with uniform priors predicts the *wrong*
                                             ordering: the listener infers vista/unrestricted as most likely, because
                                             under wider scales, ⟦some⟧ is the only true utterance in more worlds
                                             (higher L0 probability). Cognitive-default priors are needed to override
                                             this semantic signal.
                                          
                                          This pair of results formalizes R&S's core negative argument: RSA's
                                          predictions depend on the specific quantifier's monotonicity profile,
                                          not on cognitive structure, so RSA alone doesn't explain the cross-quantifier
                                          generalization that proximal restrictions are always preferred. 
                                          

                                          Pragmatic listener with a uniform latent prior (no cognitive bias): same speaker as ddprListener, uniform joint.

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                                            R&S §2.1: With uniform priors, RSA still predicts peripersonal for ⟦every⟧ — but only because the literal semantics does the work (⟦every⟧ is false under wider scales in more worlds, so L0 assigns higher probability to narrower scales). This is a semantic accident, not a cognitive explanation.

                                            R&S §2.1: With uniform priors, RSA predicts the WRONG ordering for ⟦some⟧ — the listener infers vista as most likely, not peripersonal. This is because under wider scales, ⟦some⟧ is more informative (it's the only true utterance when ⟦every⟧ is false), yielding higher L0. Cognitive-default priors (ddprPrior) are needed to override this.

                                            Connects DDRPs to [BJEST17]'s BToM architecture and [Sta02]'s common ground.

                                            When the scene is common ground ([Cla96] on joint attention), speaker and hearer derive the same DDRP. Different perceptual access yields different DDRPs, motivating R&S's requirement of perceptual co-presence.

                                            The DDRP generative model as a BToM instance over ℝ≥0∞: percept and belief are veridical deltas ([BJEST17]'s observer with full perceptual access), the plan model is the shared pragmatic speaker S, and the world-conditioned desire prior is the cognitive-default joint prior.

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                                              Delta-collapse: the BToM world marginal is the listener's unnormalized world score, Σ_l prior(w, l) · S(u | w, l).

                                              RSA's pragmatic listener IS BToM world-marginal inference, on the mathlib-PMF face: the listener's world marginal is the ddprBToM world marginal, normalized by the utterance's prior predictive mass.

                                              theorem RitchieSchiller2024.shared_scene_shared_ddrp (scene : SpatialScene Entity) (getScene : WorldSpatialScene Entity) (hcg : ∀ (w : World), getScene w = scene) (w : World) :
                                              sceneToDDRP (getScene w) = sceneToDDRP scene

                                              When all discourse participants share the same spatial scene, they derive the same DDRP — a prerequisite for successful communication about domain-restricted quantifiers.

                                              Without perceptual co-presence, domain-restricted quantifiers can receive different truth values: "every bottle is empty" under action-space restriction is false with the dinner scene but true with the partition scene (where b3 is too far to be in the action zone).

                                              R&S §4 argues that non-default domain restrictions arise from explicit discourse moves. When the QUD shifts (e.g., "Where are the blue things?"), the domain restriction can widen beyond the cognitive default. We connect this to the QUD infrastructure from [Rob12].

                                              QUD partitioning worlds by spatial emptiness profile: which bottles are empty at each spatial scale? Worlds that agree on the emptiness of peripersonal, action, and vista bottles give the same answer.

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                                                The spatial QUD distinguishes all three worlds: each has a different emptiness profile across scales.

                                                R&S §3.2 argue that default domain restrictions are objective (nonsubjective on [TD02]'s cline): they derive from perceptual/cognitive structure (location, spatial proximity), not from speaker attitude (subjective) or addressee face (intersubjective). This predicts that spatial/temporal restrictions make better defaults than evaluative restrictions (beauty, tastiness).

                                                [scontras-degen-goodman-2017] find that more objective adjectives are
                                                ordered closer to the noun — "the big blue box" over "the blue big box" —
                                                because less subjective content is more useful for communication. R&S
                                                extend this: more objective *domain restrictions* are similarly privileged
                                                as defaults because they are more likely to be shared among participants
                                                and thus better for coordination.
                                                
                                                The connection is structural: all three cognitive heuristics (availability,
                                                salience, manipulability) target features that are objective in the sense
                                                that they don't depend on speaker perspective or taste. 
                                                

                                                DDRPs are nonsubjective: the three cognitive heuristics (availability, salience, manipulability) all target spatiotemporal properties that don't depend on speaker perspective. This is not stipulated — it follows from the heuristics being defined over SpatialScale, which is a physical (observer-independent) ordering on spatial regions.

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                                                  Objectivity prediction: DDRPs (nonsubjective) precede subjective interpretations on the Traugott-Dasher cline, predicting they are available as defaults before evaluative restrictions require discourse setup. The ordering reflects [SDG17]'s finding: less subjective content is more useful for communication.

                                                  Nonsubjective is the minimum on the Traugott-Dasher cline, so DDRPs precede all subjective and intersubjective interpretations.