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Part-introducing 'percent' in English

Paper · 2022 · Elizabeth Coppock

Summary

English percent can be followed by a phrase naming the whole ("50% of the women") or by one describing a portion of that whole ("50% women", usually called the reversed reading). Coppock argues the second pattern is much wider than transitive reversed sentences. It also appears after copula-like verbs such as be, become and remain ("The solution is 30% acid"), and inside noun phrases ("50% recycled paper"). She groups all of these as part-introducing uses and documents them with attested sentences from COCA and BNCWeb. She separates them from scalar uses like "70 percent full" with an entailment test: only part-introducing sentences say something about subparts of the subject.

She then makes two proposals. A type-shift called part turns a yes/no predicate into a degree predicate that measures mereological coverage, so a slightly revised version of Pasternak's (2019) analysis of "75% full" covers every case. For cumulative-like sentences ("mix 10% manure with 90% coal"), she sketches an account in Keshet's (2019) PLural Update Semantics. This clarifies how proportion expressions are actually interpreted.

Key points

  • The paper distinguishes conservative uses (the phrase after percent names the whole) from part-introducing uses (it names the part). Part-introducing uses span reversed, predicative and attributive constructions.
  • Scalar predicatives ("40 percent sure", "100 percent faithful") imply nothing about parts of the subject. Part-introducing ones ("90 percent black" audience) can be restated with a partitive over the subject's members. Some examples, such as "100 percent American", allow both readings.
  • Reversed readings occur only with a small set of verbs (e.g. consist of, hire, use). The author treats consist of as close to a copula. Why the set is so limited remains an open question.
  • In the PLUS sketch, the operator +x gathers all values of x across assignments. Percent then applies to that sum, e.g. [x]; hired(z,x); 75%(part(women))(+x).
  • A reviewer's two-barrel scenario shows the predicted truth conditions may be too weak. A corpus study is provided as a supplementary file.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Separate readings with an entailment check: rewrite "X is N% P" as "N% of the parts of X are P" and see whether the rewrite still follows.
  • I2. A single lifting operator turns any yes/no property into a degree of coverage, so one percent rule serves both "full" and "Hispanic".
  • I3. Measure the proportion only after all other clause conditions have filtered the referent. The whole is then everything that satisfies the clause (all tobacco used), not a single object.
  • I4. Reversed readings depend on the verb, which suggests a lexical whitelist rather than a general rule.
  • I5. The reviewer's barrel scenario is a minimal case where the formal analysis says true but speakers balk.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): A predicative-percent frame could run this rewrite test to choose a part-distribution frame or a scalar degree frame, and log the choice as its explanation.
  • I2 (world): The measures layer could store "30% acid" as a coverage fraction over the entity's parts, while natively gradable adjectives keep their own closed scales.
  • I3 (world): When building holdings and events, compute a percent's base set only after the clause's constraints are applied, so "used 75% domestic tobacco" refers to all tobacco used.
  • I4 (tree): The parser or UD conversion could allow a "N% NOUN" object to be read as a part description only under verbs such as consist of, hire or use, and flag other cases.
  • I5 (learn): Add such scenarios to evaluation as negative controls, so cumulative percent handling is tested on cases where literal truth and natural description come apart.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Boston UniversityBoston · United States26 works · 4,022 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 870 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 works

Cite

Cite as Elizabeth Coppock. 2022. Part-introducing 'percent' in English. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.5791

@article{coppock2022part,
  title = {{Part-introducing 'percent' in English}},
  author = {Elizabeth Coppock},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.5791},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5791}
}

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