ABSTRACT. This article develops a Gricean account for the computation of scalar implicatures in cases where one scalar term is in the scope of another. It shows that a cross-product of two quantitative scales yields the appropriate scale for many such cases. One exception is cases involving disjunction. For these, I propose an analysis that makes use of a novel, partially ordered quantitative scale for disjunction and capitalizes on the idea that implicatures may have different epistemic status.1. INTRODUCTION A Starting Point: Gazdar's AccountBuilding on ideas of Grice (1967) and Horn (1972), Gazdar (1979) develops a general account of scalar implicatures. This general picture has been widely accepted (see e.g., the textbooks by Levinson (1983, pp. 132-136) and Gamut (1991, pp. 204-209)). To illustrate these ideas consider the examples in (1) and (2).(1)Kai had peas or broccoli last night. Kai didn't have peas and broccoli last night.(2) Kai had some of the peas last night. Kai didn't have all of the peas last night.The ideas in this paper developed out of my reactions to two separate presentations by Gennaro Chierchia and Bernhard Schwarz at Tübingen University in October 2000 and subsequent discussions with both of the authors. I am very grateful to both of them for their insights and their willingness to discuss these issues with me. Kai von Fintel also deserves special thanks for making it clearer to me what I was saying and how it relates to what other people have said. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Workshop on Formal Pragmatics at the Zentrum für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft in Berlin. I also thank Manfred Krifka, Laurence Horn, Irene Heim, Ede Zimmermann, Robert van Rooy, Winnie Lechner, Fritz Hamm, Kazuko Yatsushiro, Martin Hackl, Danny Fox, and Elena Guerzoni for useful comments along the way, and Katrin Petodnig and Oliver Bott for correcting several typos. Finally, I am grateful to the three anonymous reviewers and the editor, Laurence Horn, whose detailed comments helped me to improve thepaper substantially. All remaining errors are solely my own responsibility.
Theories of total reconstruction have generally supposed that movement can be followed by an undoing operation like LF lowering (May 1977(May , 1985 or deletion of higher copies (Chomsky 1993). We argue that reconstruction effects can be derived only if the original movement is purely phonological. There are no undoing operations. We present three distinct arguments, based on an interaction between raising and wh-movement in English, facts from agreement with group terms in British English, and multiple scrambling in Japanese. The arguments imply that the T-model is correct in supposing that movement that affects both LF and PF must precede movement that affects only PF.
It has been generally assumed that certain categories of numerical expressions, such as 'more than n', 'at least n', and 'fewer than n', systematically fail to give rise to scalar implicatures in unembedded declarative contexts. Various proposals have been developed to explain this perceived absence. In this paper, we consider the relevance of scale granularity to scalar implicature, and make two novel predictions: first, that scalar implicatures are in fact available from these numerical expressions at the appropriate granularity level, and second, that these implicatures are attenuated if the numeral has been previously mentioned or is otherwise salient in the context. We present novel experimental data in support of both of these predictions, and discuss the implications of this for recent accounts of numerical quantifier usage.
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