A puzzle for theories of redundancy: Exhaustification, incrementality, and the notion of local context

Abstract

The present paper discusses novel data which are problematic for assertability conditions based on redundancy (Stalnaker 1979 't pregnant or (she is and) it doesn't show and in particular from the optional presence of she is (pregnant). These data are even more puzzling if compared to corresponding conditionals like If Mary is pregnant, (#she is and) it doesn't show where the she is (pregnant) part is unacceptable as expected. In response to this puzzle, we present a solution based on two ingredients: (i) exhaustification and (ii) a notion of incremental redundancy. As we show, exhaustifying a sentence has an effect on the (incremental) redundancy status of its constituents. As a consequence of this, she is (pregnant) is actually not redundant in the disjunctive sentence above, provided the latter is exhaustified. We explore two possible ways of implementing this solution. The first is based on a definition of incremental redundancy which does not make use of local contexts as proposed by Fox (2008Fox ( , 2013

Hurford Conditionals

“…The second theory of oddness is based on a notion of triviality (Stalnaker 1974, 1978, van der Sandt 1992, Singh 2008a, Schlenker 2009, Mayr & Romoli 2016. The idea is that one should not assert a sentence which has parts which only provides trivially true or trivially false information in their local context:…”

Presupposed ignorance and exhaustification: how scalar implicatures and presuppositions interact

“…Fox 2008;George 2008;Schlenker 2008Schlenker , 2009Rothschild 2011), whose central tenet is that the way presuppositions project in the scope of an operator is fully determined by the truth-conditional contribution of the operator (as it can be assessed when it takes non-presuppositional arguments). See also Mayr and Romoli (2016) for a related discussion of how presuppositions are predicted to project under the scope of Exh in disjunctive and conditional sentences, within the framework of Schlenker (2008Schlenker ( , 2009 Innocent exclusion is then defined as follows. The only change is that now strong negation is used.…”

Picky predicates: why believe doesn’t like interrogative complements, and other puzzles

“…Namely, if such predicates take a mixed complement, the interrogative conjunct will always be redundant, in the sense that leaving it out would not affect the interpretation of the sentence as a whole. Such redundancy is known to manifest itself as unacceptability (see, e.g.,Schlenker 2009;Katzir and Singh 2013;Mayr and Romoli 2016).…”