Broaden Your Views: Implicatures of Domain Widening and the “Logicality” of Language

Abstract

This article presents a unified theory of polarity-sensitive items (PSIs) based on the notion of domain widening. PSIs include negative polarity items (like Italian mai ‘ever’), universal free choice items (like Italian qualunque ‘any/whatever’), and existential free choice items (like Italian uno qualunque ‘a whatever’). The proposal is based on a ‘‘recursive,’’ grammatically driven approach to scalar implicatures that breaks with the traditional view that scalar implicatures arise via post- grammatical pragmatic processes. The main claim is that scalar items optionally activate scalar alternatives that, when activated, are then recursively factored into meaning via an alternative sensitive operator similar to only. PSIs obligatorily activate domain alternatives that are factored into meaning in much the same way.

Spotting, collecting and documenting negative polarity items

“…Quantifiers such as any have attracted a lot of attention and the fact that there is a free-choice item any in English has led to theories that try to combine the two properties of being free-choice and NPI (cf. Kadmon and Landman 1993;Chierchia 2006). However, a solid database for research and theory development of NPIs, e.g.…”

“…According to the theories proposed in Kadmon and Landman (1993), Krifka (1995), and Chierchia (2006), which focus on the meaning and pragmatics of NPIs, these items have the semantic properties of domain widening and strengthening. They may introduce alternatives to the foreground Information which induce an ordering relation of specificity.…”

Inference and exact numerical representation in early language development

“…All cardinalities are consistent with these meanings, and they therefore provide no informative boundaries to new numeral denotations. 13 Thus, our suggestion is that the child uses augmented meanings to compute implicatures for unknown numerals (akin to what Spector, 2007, calls a "second-order implicature" in his discussion of the singular-plural distinction; for similar proposals extended to disjunction and other quantifiers, see Fox, 2007;Chierchia, 2004;Kratzer & Shimoyama, 2002;Chierchia, Spector, & Fox, 2007). 14 Since the augmented meaning of one (exactly one) specifies an upper bound, it can meaningfully restrict the interpretation of three to "some cardinality greater than one".…”

On scalar readings of French propre ‘own’

“…Yesterday, Mary saw any student that wanted to see her. (Chierchia 2006: 539) In a nutshell, Chierchia (2006) hypothesizes the existence of a silent focus sensitive operator E in order to give a unified account of polarity sensitivity through domain widening (cf. Kadmon andLandman 1993, Lahiri 1998).…”

“…Besides the exhaustivity operator O or Exh (akin to only), a silent focus sensitive operator E akin to overt even has already been proposed, mainly to account for readings involving Negative Polarity Items (NPIs), in particular minimizers (cf. Heim 1984, Krifka 1995, Chierchia 2006, 2013. By examining the scalar readings associated with propre, this paper will extend the empirical basis for assuming the existence of E and clarify the conditions necessary for the insertion of E.…”