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This chapter examines the currently fashionable notion of ‘experimental semantics’, and argues that most work in natural language semantics has always been experimental. The oft-cited dichotomy between ‘theoretical’ (or ‘armchair’) and ‘experimental’ is bogus and should be dropped form the discourse. The same holds for dichotomies like ‘intuition-based’ (or ‘thought experiments’) vs. ‘empirical’ work (and ‘real experiments’). The so-called new ‘empirical’ methods are often nothing more than collecting the large-scale ‘intuitions’ or, doing multiple thought experiments. Of course the use of multiple subjects could well allow for a better experiment than the more traditional single or few subject methodologies. But whether or not this is the case depends entirely on the question at hand. In fact, the chapter considers several multiple-subject studies and shows that the particular methodology in those cases does not necessarily provide important insights, and the chapter argues that some its claimed benefits are incorrect.

The semantics of good places strong constraints on the better-studied and near-synonymous items ought and should. I argue that comparative goodness fact constrain – but do not determine – the interpretation of ought, and propose “Sloman’s Principle”: ought p implies that p is better than all of its alternatives. This is not yet a semantics for ought, but it takes us surprisingly far, as I show by analysing a number of puzzles involving ought and probabilistic information. It is also incompatible with the classically valid inference patterns “agglomeration” and “deontic detachment”. Several examples and an experiment show that this consequence is correct. The account can be strengthened to enforce validities such as the “Smith argument” (Horty 2003) and Weakening (Cariani 2015). Finally, I provide data showing that ought and should are actually the positive forms of gradable verbs, and discuss prospects for deriving their behaviour from the structure of their scales.

The semantics of the adjectives places strong constraints on theories of the better-studied epistemic auxiliaries. This chapter motivates some basic connections – for instance, must asymmetrically entails likely; likely asymmetrically entails might and possible; and certain asymmetrically entails must (modulo the evidential presupposition of the latter). In addition, I present a lottery experiment showing that might has a context-sensitive meaning that is stronger than possible’s. These connections suffice to rule out the classical treatment from modal logic, as revived recently by von Fintel & Gillies (2010). It also rules out Kratzer’s (1991) theory. The probabilistic theory of Swanson (2006); Lassiter (2011, 2016) satisfies our desiderata, though, as does Swanson’s (2015) blend of the scalar semantics with Kratzer’s account. Both have access to a plausible formalization of must’s evidential component, but the latter has additional interesting features – both strengths and weaknesses – involving dualities and the treatment of so-called “epistemic ought”.

Unlike English nouns, Mandarin nouns do not syntactically reflect the mass/count distinction, but are akin to English mass nouns (e.g. water) in that they refer to unindividuated pluralities. Thus speakers must use classifiers after numerals and demonstratives to semantically partition all nouns: count concepts must be counted with a classifier (一架钢琴, one FRAME piano) the way English mass nouns are (one GLASS OF water). While an ontological distinction is not apparent in Chinese nouns, some have argued that this information might be encoded at the classifier level and that classifiers might play a functional role similar to that of gender-marked determiners. In order to better understand the role massifiers and classifiers play in language comprehension, three visual world experiments were conducted. Phonological cohort competition and anticipatory eye-movements were examined in cases of English mass reference, Chinese count reference, and Chinese mass reference. Results suggest that classifiers are interpreted structurally and have an immediate impact on referential selection, and this effect is potentially stronger with massifiers and mass referents.