Exhaustiveness effects in clefts are not truth-functional

Contradicting (not-)at-issueness in exclusives and clefts: An empirical study

“…(topic-comment it-cleft) 2015), intra-speaker cancellation (Mayol & Castroviejo 2013), NPI licensing, among other things (Horn 2014). Yet Drenhaus, Zimmermann & Vasishth (2011), Destruel (2012, and Destruel et al (2015) have all modelled their claims about the not-atissue exhaustivity of clefts compared to the behavior of the at-issue exhaustivity of exclusives. The goal of the present study is to test empirically how the not-at-issue status of an inference influences acceptability judgments in a variation on more standard cancellation tasks, referred to here as felicity under contradiction: in our design, a conjunct explicitly negates the relevant at-issue and not-at-issue inferences resulting in a contradiction for semantic inferences.…”

On the status of exhaustiveness in cleft sentences: An empirical and cross-linguistic study of English also-/only-clefts and Italian anche-/solo-clefts

“…to be a stable meaning component of this item. 5 By contrast, as recently pointed out by Drenhaus et al (2011), there is no consensus about the best way of accounting for the exhaustiveness "effect" (as the authors call it) or exhaustiveness "understanding" (see Declerck 1988), exhaustiveness (which seems to be the most widespread and used, among others, by Horn 1981;Declerck 1988;Drenhaus et al 2011;and Patten 2012) and the closely related exhaustive listing (in Horn 1981: 132 the term refers to the fact that the cleft constituent provides the exhaustive list of elements for which the predicate realized in the cleft clause holds) and exhaustivity (see, for instance, Schulz and Van Rooij 2006), we find the terms uniqueness (Delin and Oberlander 2005) and exclusiveness (Collins 1991: 69). In the Italian linguistics literature reviewed, we found the terms esaustività (Roggia 2009: 99) and univocità (both terms are used interchangeably by D' Achille et al 2005).…”

“…This is in contrast with most of the theoretical literature (Horn 1981;É.Kiss 1998;Hedberg 2000;Hedberg and Fadden 2007, etc. ) as well as with recent experimental studies (see, among others, Drenhaus et al 2011;Destruel 2012), which discuss the exhaustiveness issue generally on the basis of invented examples alone. Our empirically based analysis involves clefts retrieved from different written sources (see the Corpora section at the end of the paper for more information).…”

“…It has been associated -among others -with the French phrases clivées (Perrin-Naffakh 1996;Clech-Darbon et al 1999;Destruel 2012), the Spanish oraciones hendidas (Moreno Cabrera 1999: 4248), the German Spaltsätze (Drenhaus et al 2011) and the Swedish clefts (Bouma et al 2010). Other than with English cleft sentences, this paper will be concerned with the Italian frasi scisse, of the type given in (2), 1 which have also been associated with exhaustiveness (see D'Achille et al 2005;Roggia 2009): 2…”

“…Although exhaustiveness and clefts are commonly associated and seem quite tightly connected, the exact nature of their relation, and in particular whether it is semantic or pragmatic in nature, is a major source of controversy (a recent review of the different viewpoints taken in the literature can be found in Drenhaus et al 2011). Moreover, when reviewing the relevant literature, we find that very different proposals have been put forward to identify the source of exhaustiveness: for some it has a truth-functional basis, for others it should be accounted for in terms of a presupposition or a conventional implicature and yet for others it is best accounted for as a conversational implicature.…”