Indefinites in comparatives

The goal of this paper is to explain the meaning and distribution of indefinites in comparatives, focusing on English some and any and German irgend-indefinites. We consider three competing theories of comparatives in combination with an alternative semantics of some and any, and a novel account of stressed irgend-indefinites. One of the resulting accounts, based on Heim’s analysis of comparatives, predicts all the relevant differences in quantificational force, and explains why free choice indefinites are licensed in comparatives

Any: from scalarity to arbitrariness

In spite of the existence of a vast literature on any, no clear consensus has finally emerged as to its semantic nature and behaviour. We argue here that the deep unity of any is to be found in the link that this item sets up between scalarity and arbitrariness in the sense of Fine (1985). The traditional distinction between any as a free choice (FC) or as a polarity sensitive (PS) element is put in a radically new perspective: any is analysed as scalar at root, along the lines of Lee & Horn (1994), but it emerges either as FC or PS depending on which type of link between scalarity and arbitrariness on events is constructed. So, the `two' any appear as two different but related strategies towards the same problem, instead of two parallel and accidentally similar behaviour

Only 'Only'? An Experimental Window on Exclusiveness

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Weak and strong triggers

The idea that presupposition triggers have different intrinsic properties has gradually made its way into the literature on presuppositions and become a current assumption in most approaches. The distinctions mentioned in the different works have been based on introspective data, which seem, indeed, very suggestive. In this paper, we take a different look at some of these distinctions by using a simple experimental approach based on judgment of naturalness about sentences in various contexts. We show that the alleged difference between weak (or soft) and strong (or hard) triggers is not as clear as one may wish and that the claim that they belong to different lexical classes of triggers is probably much too strong