An Implicature account of Homogeneity and Non-maximality
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An Implicature account of Homogeneity and Non-maximality Moshe E. Bar-Lev1 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract I provide arguments in favor of an implicature approach to Homogeneity (Magri in Pragmatics, semantics and the case of scalar implicatures, Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp 99–145, 2014) where the basic meaning of the kids laughed is some of the kids laughed, and its strengthened meaning is all of the kids laughed. The arguments come from asymmetries between positive and negatives sentences containing definite plurals with respect to (1) children’s behavior (Tieu et al. in Front Psychol, 2019. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02329), (2) the availability of Non-maximal readings, and (3) the robustness of neither-true-nor-false (‘gappy’) judgments (Križ and Chemla in Nat Lang Semant 23(3):205–248, 2015). I propose to avoid some problems of Magri’s analysis by modeling the Implicature account of Homogeneity after the Implicature account of Free Choice, based on a hitherto unnoticed analogy between the two phenomena. The approach that emerges has the advantages of Magri’s implicature account of Homogeneity (predicting asymmetries), while at the same time bears a close resemblance to recent approaches to Non-maximality (Malamud in Semant Pragmat 5(3):1–58. https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.5.3, 2012; Križ and Spector in Interpreting plural predication: homogeneity and non-maximality, Ms., Institut Jean Nicod, 2017), which enables restating their account of Non-maximality as following from the context-sensitivity of implicature calculation. Keywords Homogeneity · Non-maximality · Exhaustivity · Innocent inclusion · Context dependency
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Moshe E. Bar-Lev [email protected] The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
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M. E. Bar-Lev
1 Introduction 1.1 Homogeneity (1) exemplifies the issue of Homogeneity with definite plurals:1 In out-of-the-blue contexts we infer from the sentence in (1a) that all the kids laughed and from the sentence in (1b) that none of the kids laughed (Löbner 1987, 2000; Schwarzschild 1994; Krifka 1996; Gajewski 2005; Magri 2014; Križ 2015, 2016; Križ and Spector 2017). (1)
a. The kids laughed. (i) ≈ All the kids laughed. (ii) ≈ Some of the kids laughed. b. The kids didn’t laugh. (i) ≈ Not all the kids laughed. (ii) ≈ None of the kids laughed.
While it is entirely possible that the reading reported for (1b) can be derived by scoping negation below whatever it is that provides the universal quantification over the kids in (1a), it is still surprising that (at least with no special intonation) there is no reading for (1b) where it means not all the kids laughed, which is what we should expect if negation takes scope above that putative universal quantification. Moreover, even when the definite plural cannot possibly take scope above negation, for example when it contains a bound variable as in (2) which prevents the definite plural from taking wide scope, the only possible reading is one that can be paraphrased as negation taking scope above an existential quantifi
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