Only , or , and free choice presuppositions
- PDF / 568,933 Bytes
- 35 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 92 Downloads / 182 Views
Only, or, and free choice presuppositions Sam Alxatib1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Bar-Lev and Fox (Natl Lang Semant 28:175–223, 2020), B-L&F, redefine the exhaustification operator, Exh, so that it negates innocently excludable (IE) alternatives and asserts innocently includable (II) ones. They similarly redefine the exclusive particle only so that it negates IE-alternatives and presupposes II ones. B-L&F justify their revision of only on the basis of Alxatib’s finding (in: Proceedings of NELS 44, 2014) that only presupposes free choice (FC) in cases like Kim was only allowed to eat soup or salad. I show challenges to B-L&F’s view of only and argue against extending II to its meaning. Instead I propose that FC is better treated as a “presuppositional implicature” in such cases. I show the details of how this can be done and identify the necessary (and occasionally novel) auxiliary assumptions. Keywords Free choice permission · Disjunction · Only · Exhaustification · Innocent exclusion · Innocent inclusion · Focus-marking · Focus-alternatives
1 Introduction In recent work, Bar-Lev and Fox (2020)1 —hereafter B-L&F—proposed new definitions of the exclusive particle only and the exhaustivity operator Exh. On their revisions, the two operators generate inferences not only from what Fox (2007) dubbed the innocently excludable alternatives to the prejacent—the propositional argument to only/Exh—but also from what B-L&F call its innocently includable (II) alternatives. In the case of Exh, the motivation for involving II-alternatives comes from a group of sentences that intuitively license free choice (or free choice-like) inferences—FC—but 1 Also Bar-Lev and Fox (2017) and Bar-Lev (2018).
I thank an anonymous NALS reviewer, Itai Bassi, Lucas Champollion, Filipe Hisao Kobayashi, Paul Marty, Jacopo Romoli, Philippe Schlenker, Yael Sharvit, Yasutada Sudo, and audiences at Philippe Schlenker’s formal pragmatics seminar at NYU, and the 94th LSA meeting in New Orleans.
B 1
Sam Alxatib [email protected] Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10016, USA
123
S. Alxatib
that are not predicted to do so by earlier, Exh-based accounts of FC. In the case of only, which is my main concern, B-L&F’s revision is intended to explain why sentences like (1) presuppose FC (Alxatib 2014). (1) Kim is only allowed to eat [soup or salad]F . Presupposition: Kim is allowed to eat soup, Kim is allowed to eat salad. In what follows, I will argue that B-L&F’s account of only, and of (1), is incorrect. In my argument, I will cite other cases where only seems to presuppose FC, but where appeal to Innocent Inclusion does not help. These cases show that FC presuppositions under only have another source, which leaves B-L&F’s recruitment of II-alternatives unmotivated. I will present an account of only’s FC presuppositions as “presuppositional implicatures”, following the proposals of Gajewski and Sharvit (2012) and Marty and Romoli (2020).
2 Background A reasonable hypothesis about the semantics of only is that it (a) pre
Data Loading...
