The formal semantics literature has long been concerned with the complex array of inferences that different open class lexical items trigger. For example, why does (1a) give rise to the inference (2a), while the structurally identical (1b) triggers the inference (2b)?
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a. Jo doesn’t believe that Bo left.
b. Jo doesn’t know that Bo left. -
a. Jo believes that Bo didn’t leave.
b. Bo left.
c. Bo didn’t leave.
A major finding of this literature is that lexically triggered inferences are conditioned by surprising aspects of the syntactic context that a word occurs in. For example, while (3a), (3b), and (4a) trigger the inference (2b), (4b) triggers the inference (2c).
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a. Jo remembered that Bo left.
b. Jo didn’t remember that Bo left. -
a. Bo remembered to leave.
b. Bo didn’t remember to leave.
For a detailed description of the MegaVeridicality datasets, including the item construction and collection methods and discussion of how to use a dataset on this scale to address questions in linguistic theory, please see the references below.
Data
| Sentences | Predicates | Frames | Download | Citation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1088 | 517 | 2 | v1 (zip) | White & Rawlins 2018 |
| 3938 | 773 | 9 | v2.1 (zip) | White & Rawlins 2018 White et al. 2018 |
References
Researchers
 Aaron Steven White |
 Kyle Rawlins |
 Benjamin Van Durme |
 Rachel Rudinger |