Discourse related readings of scalar particles

Abstract

This paper offers an analysis of certain uses of the particles noch/still according to which they scope above a speech act operator. This allows us to keep their meaning contribution stable, and requires a framework in which the operators are part of the LF.

Additive particles with a built-in Gricean pragmatics

“…Previous work on again (Klein 2001, Sauerland & Yatsushiro 2015 has analyzed again as a speech-act-based particle, as illustrated in (51) and (52) Following this line, Umbach (2009aUmbach ( ,b, 2012 and Beck (2016) propose that German noch is a speech act operator and accounts for the use of German noch in (53) with a speech-act-based proposal: the use of noch reflects the order of mention. Our proposed theory is similar to Umbach (2009aUmbach ( ,b, 2012 and Beck (2016)'s theory in that in both theories, NOCH is analyzed as a discourse-level operator. However, in Beck (2016)'s theory, at least in some uses, NOCH operates on the act of speech utterance, while in our current theory, the use of NOCH always operates on the information content of speech utterance.…”

“…Comparison to related work. In the following, we briefly discuss two other approaches to the meaning of NOCH-type particles in the formal semantics literature: (i) the speech-act-based approach (e.g., Umbach 2009a,b, 2012, Beck 2016, and (ii) the focus-based approach (e.g., Liu 2000). Of course, NOCH-type particles have been a hot topic for decades, so a more comprehensive comparison of theories is beyond what we can do here.…”

Approaches to Hungarian

“…We start with a discussion of temporal/continuity még. This kind of aspectual particle has been discussed in detail in a number of works earlier, mostly focusing on English and German (Michaelis 1993;Ippolito 2007;Beck 2016;Klein 2007). Here we adopt a rather straightforward definition and we address some differences with earlier definitions in Section 5.…”

“…In addition, there are a variety of other aspectual elements that are related to még morphologically, etymologically, and/or semantically. In enumerating the various senses we rely on a number of earlier treatments of crosslinguistic equivalents of még, notably Michaelis (1993), Ippolito (2007), and Beck (2016).…”

“…For present purposes, we assume that both the comparative and base form have a second degree argument. In the case of the base form, that is the contextual standard, and in the case of the comparative, it is the degree supplied by the entity that serves as comparison (see Heim 2001).…”