Ecole Normale Supérieure I. A puzzle about plural indefinites Consider the following sentences: (1) a. The homework contains difficult problems b. The homework doesn't contain difficult problems (2) a. One of my students has solved difficult problems b. None of my students has solved difficult problems These two pairs raise the following problem: in both cases, the b) sentence is not equivalent to the logical negation of the a) sentence. Indeed, (1)a conveys that the homework contains more than one difficult problem, and (2)a that one of my students has solved two, or more than two, difficult problems. But (1)b does not mean that the problem doesn't contain several difficult problems; it has the same truth-conditional content as "The homework doesn't contain any difficult problem". Likewise, (2)b doesn't mean that none of my students has solved two or more problems (which would be true in a situation where a student has solved exactly one difficult problem), but rather that none of my students has solved any problem at all. In a nutshell, horses and difficult problems in the a) sentences receive an at least twointerpretation, while they receive an at least one-interpretation in the b) sentences. One can wonder whether this kind of behavior is restricted to Bare Plurals (or, in French, to DPs headed by des), or is found with full DPs as well. In fact, plural DPs headed by some display a similar behaviour, though this is harder to show due to the fact that such DPs, being positive polarity items, cannot take scope immediately below negation. Consider however: (3) There was a set of problems. Some of them were easy, others were difficult. I know for sure that … a) Jack solved some difficult problems b) it is impossible that Jack solved some difficult problems
Scalar implicatures are traditionally viewed as pragmatic inferences which result from a reasoning about speakers' communicative intentions . This view has been challenged in recent years by theories which propose that scalar implicatures are a grammatical phenomenon. Such theories claim that scalar implicatures can be computed in embedded positions and enter into the recursive computation of meaning-something that is not expected under the traditional, pragmatic view. Recently, Geurts and Pouscoulous (2009) presented an experimental study in which embedded scalar implicatures were not detected. Using a novel version of the truth value judgment tasks, we provide evidence that subjects sometimes compute embedded scalar implicatures.
Our paper addresses the following question: Is there a general characterization, for all predicates P that take both declarative and interrogative complements (responsive predicates in the sense of Lahiri's 2002 typology, see Lahiri, Questions and Answers in Embedded Contexts, OUP, 2002), of the meaning of the P-interrogative clause construction in terms of the meaning of the P-declarative clause construction? On our account, if P is a responsive predicate and Q a question embedded under P, then the meaning of 'P + Q' is, informally, "to be in the relation expressed by P to some potential complete answer to Q". We show that this rule allows us to derive veridical and non-veridical readings of embedded questions, depending on whether the embedding verb is veridical or not, and provide novel empirical evidence supporting the generalization. We then enrich our basic proposal to account for the presuppositions induced by the embedding verbs, as well as for the generation of intermediate exhaustive readings of embedded questions (Klinedinst and Rothschild in Semant Pragmat 4:1-23, 2011). KeywordsQuestions • Interrogative semantics • Embedded questions • Presupposition • Exhaustivity • Attitude predicates • Knowledge • Factivity • Veridicality A version of the research reported here was first presented at the MIT LingLunch in 2007 and at the Journées de Sémantique et de Modélisation 2008 and in a detailed hand-out form (see Spector and Egré 2007). Our proposal has evolved very significantly since then.
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