Connectedness as a constraint on exhaustification

Enguehard, Émile; Chemla, Emmanuel

doi:10.1007/s10988-019-09286-3

Cited by 10 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 21 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Thus perhaps this interpretation fails to arise in the scope of negation not simply because it would be less informative than the basic semantic one, but rather because it would be uninformative in a particular way, describing a disjoint rather than convex region of the relevant scale. In fact, exactly this sort of explanation is proposed by Enguehard & Chemla (2019) for the unavailability of certain readings of weak scalar items that could in principle be generated by the application of a covert exhaustification operator: these are blocked, they argue, by a constraint that specifies that parses resulting in non-connected meanings are dispreferred. While the specifics of their account differ from ours, the central idea is very similar.…”

Section: Beyond Bare Numeralsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Numerals under negation: Empirical findings

Solt

Waldon

2019

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Despite a vast literature on the semantics and pragmatics of cardinal numerals, it has gone largely unnoticed that they exhibit a variety of polarity sensitivity, in that they require contextual support to occur felicitously in the scope of sentential negation. We present the results of a corpus analysis and two experiments that demonstrate that negated cardinals are acceptable when the negated value has been asserted or otherwise explicitly mentioned in the preceding discourse context, but unacceptable when such a value is neither mentioned nor inferable from that context. In this, bare cardinals exhibit both similarities to and differences from other types of numerical expressions. We propose an account of our findings based on the notion of convexity of linguistic meanings (Gärdenfors 2004) and discuss the implications for the semantics of numerical expressions more generally.

show abstract

Section: Beyond Bare Numeralsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Numerals under negation: Empirical findings

Solt

Waldon

2019

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…What's needed is to replace (9) with a principle that still disallows EXH under negation in cases like (4-a), but allows it in cases like (2-a). A recent proposal in the literature, Enguehard & Chemla (2018), has independently argued for a principle that achieves exactly this. Enguehard & Chemla (2018) argue that the standard formulation in (9) based on logical strength should be replaced by a constraint based on a notion of 'connectedness,' a logical notion related to monotonicity.…”

Section: (4-a)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A recent proposal in the literature, Enguehard & Chemla (2018), has independently argued for a principle that achieves exactly this. Enguehard & Chemla (2018) argue that the standard formulation in (9) based on logical strength should be replaced by a constraint based on a notion of 'connectedness,' a logical notion related to monotonicity. Roughly, the principle in (23) makes a parse strongly dispreferred if it doesn't give rise to a connected meaning.…”

Section: (4-a)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Formal details aside (for which we refer the reader to Enguehard & Chemla 2018), what is relevant here is that this proposal differs from the standard one precisely in that it predicts EXH not to be banned in the scope of negation with FREE CHOICE, while still predicting the standard asymmetry between positive and negative in the case of simple disjunction. 8 Their argument is that it would intuitively be easier to force a NEGATED FREE CHOICE reading as in (24), than the corresponding negated exclusivity meaning in (25).…”

Section: (4-a)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As we discuss below, the similarity between the positive and negative free choice cases and the difference observed in the simple disjunction cases are challenging for the implicature approach. We outline the challenge in detail and briefly discuss how the implicature approach might be developed to account for our results, based on a recent proposal by Enguehard & Chemla (2018) on the distribution of implicatures. The rest of the paper is organized as follows.…”

Section: Dual Prohibitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Homogeneity or implicature: An experimental investigation of free choice

Tieu

Bill

Romoli

2019

SALT

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A sentence containing disjunction in the scope of a possibility modal, such as Angie is allowed to buy the boat or the car, gives rise to the FREE CHOICE inference that Angie can freely choose between the two. This inference poses a well-known puzzle, in that it is not predicted by a standard treatment of modals and disjunction (e.g., Kamp 1974). To complicate things further, FREE CHOICE tends to disappear under negation: Angie is not allowed to buy the boat or the car doesn’t merely convey the negation of free choice, but rather the stronger DUAL PROHIBITION reading that Angie cannot buy either one. There are two main approaches to the FREE CHOICE-DUAL PROHIBITION pattern in the literature. While they both capture the relevant data points, they make a testable, divergent prediction regarding the status of positive and negative sentences in a context in which Angie can only buy one of the two objects, e.g., the boat. In particular, the implicature-based approach (e.g., Fox 2007; Klinedinst 2007; Bar-Lev & Fox 2017) predicts that the positive sentence is true in such a context, but associated with a false implicature, while it predicts the negative sentence to be straightforwardly false. The alternative approach (e.g., Aloni 2018; Goldstein 2018; Willer 2017) predicts both the positive and negative sentences to be equally undefined. Investigating the contrast between these sentences in such a context therefore provides a clear way to address the debate between implicature and non-implicature accounts of FREE CHOICE. We present an experiment aiming to do just this, the results of which present a challenge for the implicature approach. We further discuss how the implicature approach could in theory be developed to account for our results, based on a recent proposal by Enguehard & Chemla (2018) on the distribution of implicatures.

show abstract

Presupposed free choice and the theory of scalar implicatures

Marty

Romoli

2021

Linguist and Philos

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A disjunctive sentence like Olivia took Logic or Algebra conveys that Olivia didn’t take both classes (exclusivity) and that the speaker doesn’t know which of the two classes she took (ignorance). The corresponding sentence with a possibility modal, Olivia can take Logic or Algebra, conveys instead that she can take Logic and that she can take Algebra (free choice). These exclusivity, ignorance and free choice inferences are argued by many to be scalar implicatures. Recent work has looked at cases in which exclusivity and ignorance appear to be computed instead at the presupposition level, independently from the assertion. On the basis of those data, Spector and Sudo (Linguist Philos 40(5):473–517, 2017) have argued for a hybrid account relying on a pragmatic principle for deriving implicatures in the presupposition. In this paper, we observe that a sentence like Noah is unaware that Olivia can take Logic or Algebra has a reading on which free choice appears in the presupposition, but not in the assertion, and we show that deriving this reading is challenging on Spector and Sudo’s (2017) hybrid account. Following the dialectic in Fox (Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics, Palgrave, London, pp 71–120, 2007), we argue against a pragmatic approach to presupposition-based implicatures on the ground that it is not able to account for presupposed free choice. In addition, we raise a novel challenge for Spector and Sudo’s (2017) account coming from the conflicting presupposed ignorance triggered by sentences like #Noah is unaware that I have a son or a daughter, which is infelicitous even if it’s not common knowledge whether the speaker has a son or a daughter. More generally, our data reveals a systematic parallelism between the assertion and presupposition levels in terms of exclusivity, ignorance, and free choice. We argue that such parallels call for a unified analysis and we sketch how a grammatical theory of implicatures where meaning strengthening operates in a similar way at both levels (Gajewski and Sharvit in Nat Lang Semant 20(1):31–57, 2012; Magri in A theory of individual-level predicates based on blind mandatory scalar implicatures, MIT dissertation, 2009; Marty in Implicatures in the DP domain, MIT dissertation, 2017) can account for such parallels.

show abstract

Connectedness as a constraint on exhaustification

Cited by 10 publications

References 21 publications

Numerals under negation: Empirical findings

Numerals under negation: Empirical findings

Homogeneity or implicature: An experimental investigation of free choice

Presupposed free choice and the theory of scalar implicatures

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About