The presuppositions of soft triggers are obligatory scalar implicatures

Presupposition triggers can be divided in two groups, ‘soft’ and ‘hard,’ based on whether the presuppositions they give rise to are easily defeasible and whether they project uniformly in quantificational sentences (Abusch 2002, 2010, Charlow 2009). Recently, two ideas have been put forward in the literature in connection to this problem. First, soft triggers should be thought of as non-presuppositional items associated with lexical alternatives (Abusch 2002, 2010). Second, the projection behavior of presuppositions can be accounted for by a theory based on scalar implicatures (Chemla 2009a, Chemla 2010). In this article, building on these two ideas, I propose a scalar approach to the presuppositions of soft triggers. The contribution of the proposal is twofold. First, I propose a theory of soft presuppositions as scalar implicatures that provides an account of their behavior in quantificational sentences that makes more accurate predictions than Chemla's (2009a), Chemla's (2010) and Abusch's (2010) proposals and other non-alternative-based theories that I am aware of. Second, I develop an account of the differences between soft and hard presuppositions, on the one hand, and the similarities between soft presuppositions and scalar implicatures, on the other. Finally, the proposed approach also reduces the pattern of presupposition suspension to independent principles needed in the theory of scalar implicatures.47 page(s

Implicatures and Discourse Structure

International audienceOne of the characteristic marks of Gricean implicatures in general, and scalar implicatures in particular, examples of which are given in (1), is that they are the result of a defeasible inference. (1a) John had some of the cookies (1b)John had some of the cookies. In fact he had them all. (1a) invites the inference that John didn't have all the cookies,an inference that can be defeated by additional information, as in (1b). Scalar inferences like that in (1a) thus depend upon some sort of nonmonotonic reasoning over semantic contents. They share this characteristic of defeasiblility with inferences that result in the presence of discourse relations that link discourse segments together into a discourse structure for a coherent text or dialogue---call these inferences discourse or D inferences. I have studied these inferences about discourse structure, their effects on content and how they are computed in the theory known as Segmented Discourse Representation Theory or SDRT. In this paper I investigate how the tools used to infer discourse relations apply to what Griceans and others call scalar or quantity implicatures. The benefits of this investigation are three fold: at the theoretical level, we have a unified and relatively simple framework for computing defeasible inferences both of the quantity and discourse structure varieties; further, we can capture what ' s right about the intuitions of so called "localist" views about scalar implicatures; finally, this framework permits us to investigate how D-inferences and scalar inferences might interact, in particular how discourse structure might trigger scalar inferences, thus explaining the variability(Chemla, 2008) or even non-existence of embedded implicatures noted recently (e.g., Geurts and Pouscoulous, 2009), and their occasional noncancellability. The view of scalar inferences that emerges from this study is also rather different from the way both localists and Neo- Griceans conceive of them. Both localists and Neo-Griceans view implicatures as emerging from pragmatic reasoning processes that are strictly separated from the calculation of semantic values; where they differ is at what level the pragmatic implicatures are calculated. Localists take them to be calculated in parallel with semantic composition, whereas Neo-Griceans take them to have as input the complete semantic content of the assertion. My view is that scalar inferences depend on discourse structure and large view of semantic content in which semantics and pragmatics interact in a complex way to produce an interpretation of an utterance or a discourse

The distributive ignorance puzzle

Theoretical and Experimental Linguistic

High and low uniqueness in singular wh-interrogatives

While simple singular wh-interrogatives carry a uniqueness presupposition, this is not so when they contain possibility modals. Hirsch & Schwarz (2019) account for this contrast by assuming (i) that questions can have multiple maximally informative true answers and (ii) that uniqueness is triggered lexically inside the scope of interrogative. We show that their proposal overgenerates on two accounts. Firstly, it predicts too weak a presupposition for modalized interrogatives. Secondly, it predicts unattested interpretations for interrogatives containing negation. We show that both issues can be solved using exhaustification operators. On the one hand, we obtain the desired presupposition for modalized interrogatives by assuming the lexical trigger for uniqueness to be a presuppositional variant of an exhaustification operator (Bassi, Del Pinal & Sauerland 2019). On the other, we show that unattested readings of negation can be blocked by assuming that questions presuppose that the pointwise exhaustification of their answers partitions the context of evaluation (Fox 2019). We argue that proper empirical coverage for singular wh-interrogatives requires the interaction of both exhaustification operations

Scalar implicatures and the grammar of plurality and disjunction

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 135-139).This dissertation explores the role of scalar implicatures in the grammar of plurality and disjunction. I argue that scalar implicatures are relevant not only for the meaning of plurals and disjunctions, but also for their distribution in language. For example, the computation of scalar implicatures will be shown to be the decisive factor regulating the patterns of (un)grammaticality of plural agreement with disjunctive noun phrases (Chapter 3). But before getting to conclusions like that, I will spend some time on the semantics of bare plurals (Chapter 2), developing a version of the grammatical view of scalar implicatures along the way (some necessary background on scalar implicatures will be built in Chapter 1). The claim that scalar implicatures are calculated in the grammar is very far from uncontroversial. But if they really are, then many of the facts that I discuss could be predicted, more or less straightforwardly. If one treats scalar implicature calculation as a purely pragmatic process, these facts are arguably harder to make sense of.by Natalia Ivieva.Ph.D