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Exhaustivity in questions with non-factives

“…Now, this might be taken as evidence for a simple ambiguity approach: perhaps the intuitions in (9) and (10) arise because the question can be interpreted with the G&S-denotation, in addition to being interpreted with the K-denotation as judgments like (6) and (7) show. We do think that there are strongly exhaustive readings of tell and predict (see also Heim 1994, Beck & Rullmann 1999. However, following observations by Spector (2005Spector ( , 2006, it seems to us that there is an additional, intermediate sense of tell who sang and predict who sang that is at once non-exhaustive in the sense revealed by (6) and (7), and exhaustive in the sense of (9) and (10).…”

“…If John went to a bank and Bill did too, either both went to a river or both to a financial institution. Beck & Rullmann (1999) have room only for weakly exhaustive and strongly exhaustive readings, while Sharvit (2002) seems to think that predict only has a weakly exhaustive reading. For tell, Heim (1994: 137) acknowledges something like the intermediate reading, and suggests that it reflects a unique lexical entry for the verb (and not an additional reading of embedded questions).…”

“…2 Heim builds on observations by Berman (1991). Beck & Rullmann (1999), following Heim, expand the case for (ii). 3 Note that here and below we are focusing on the veridical reading of tell wh-and predict wh-: where what is told or predicted is true.…”

“…However, on Spector's account the different readings of question-embedding verbs are not clearly related to each other: in particular, the derivation of the strongly exhaustive reading seems to bear no relation to the derivation of the intermediate reading. 7 An appeal of the accounts of Heim (1994), Beck & Rullmann (1999) and Sharvit (2002) is that they can account for weak vs. strong exhaustivity of embedded questions in a principled way, using only the standard propositionembedding semantics for the question-embedding verb. As Heim pointed out, the G&S-denotation can be derived straightforwardly from the K-denotation, and thus weak vs. strong exhaustivity can be explained as a principled ambiguity in the question denotation (or an operation in the lexical semantics of a verb that chooses one of the two types of denotation).…”

Seuren/Rullmann ambiguities as plural comparisons

“…Applied to our example in (25), we get the same result as under a classical analysis. b (25) is what Beck & Rullmann (1999) call a downward scalar predicate. Such predicates permit valid inferences from larger degrees to smaller degrees, as illustrated for the example.…”