Presupposition and Implicature in Compositional Semantics

Sauerland, Uli; Stateva, Penka

doi:10.1057/9780230210752

Cited by 15 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 56 publications

(97 reference statements)

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“…Fox 2007;Spector 2007) have suggested that a silent exhaustivity operator Exh might strengthen the meaning of natural language or and cause it to be interpreted as an exclusive rather than inclusive disjunction (see also Nute 1975). Thus, the use of Exh can break de Morgan's law.…”

Section: Ruling Out Alternative Accounts For Our Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Breaking de Morgan's law in counterfactual antecedents

Champollion

Ciardelli

Zhang

2016

SALT

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The main goal of this paper is to investigate the relation between the meaning of a sentence and its truth conditions. We report on a comprehension experiment on counterfactual conditionals, based on a context in which a light is controlled by two switches. Our main finding is that the truth-conditionally equivalent clauses (i) switch A or switch B is down and (ii) switch A and switch B are not both up make different semantic contributions when embedded in a conditional antecedent. Assuming compositionality, this means that (i) and (ii) differ in meaning, which implies that the meaning of a sentential clause cannot be identified with its truth conditions. We show that our data have a clear explanation in inquisitive semantics: in a conditional antecedent, (i) introduces two distinct assumptions, while (ii) introduces only one. Independently of the complications stemming from disjunctive antecedents, our results also challenge analyses of counterfactuals in terms of minimal change from the actual state of affairs: we show that such analyses cannot account for our findings, regardless of what changes are considered minimal.

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Section: Ruling Out Alternative Accounts For Our Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Breaking de Morgan's law in counterfactual antecedents

Champollion

Ciardelli

Zhang

2016

SALT

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“…Free-choice inferences, which have been treated as cases of scalar implicatures(Fox 2007), also appear to be processed differently from run-of-the-mill scalar implicatures(Chemla and Bott 2014).15 For simplicity, we analyze transitive predicates like lifted the piano and surrounded the castle as 1-place rather than 2-place predicates.…”

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confidence: 99%

Modified numerals and maximality

Buccola

Spector

2016

Linguist and Philos

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In this article, we describe and attempt to solve a puzzle arising from the interpretation of modified numerals like less than five and between two and five. The puzzle is this: such modified numerals seem to mean different things depending on whether they combine with distributive or non-distributive predicates. When they combine with distributive predicates, they intuitively impose a kind of upper bound, whereas when they combine with non-distributive predicates, they do not (they sometimes even impose a lower bound). We propose and explore in detail four solutions to this puzzle, each involving some notion of maximality, but differing in the type of maximality involved ('standard' maximality versus 'informativity-based' maximality) and in the source of maximality (lexically encoded in the meaning of the numeral modifier versus non-lexical). While the full range of data we consider do not conclusively favor one theory over the other three, we do argue that overall the evidence (i) goes against the view that modified numerals lexically encode a 'standard' maximality operator, and (ii) suggests the need for a pragmatic blocking mechanism that filters out readings (logical forms) of sentences that are generated by the grammar but intuitively unavailable.

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The prosody of enhanced bias in Mandarin and Japanese negative questions

Hara

Kawahara

2014

Lingua

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Presupposition and Implicature in Compositional Semantics

Cited by 15 publications

References 56 publications

Breaking de Morgan's law in counterfactual antecedents

Breaking de Morgan's law in counterfactual antecedents

Modified numerals and maximality

The prosody of enhanced bias in Mandarin and Japanese negative questions

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