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An old observation about the focus sensitive particles only and even is that they are in some sense scalar antonyms. We examine three schematic proposals raised in the literature to capture this observation, namely that only vs. even presuppose that the proposition denoted by their prejacent, p, is lower vs. higher, respectively (A) than what is EXPECTED/the default STANDARD (the 'mirative/evaluative antonymy' view), (B) than SOME (salient) alternative in the set of contextually relevant focus alternatives, C, (the 'existential antonymy' view), or (C) than ALL alternatives in C (the 'superlative antonymy' view). To tease these views apart, we examine the behavior of only vs. even in a wide range of contexts and types of discourse, concentrating on the way the C set of contextually relevant alternatives with only(C)(p) and even(C)(p) is constrained by the interaction of (i) previously uttered sentences and (ii) the salient QUD. Based on these examinations we argue for the preferability of the 'superlative antonymy' view of only and even. In contrast, we argue that the 'existential' antonymy and the 'mirative/evaluative' antonymy between only and even are apparent. The former only holds in specific contexts where one alternative to p is made maximally salient. As to the latter, we show that while an evaluative ('above the standard' / 'a lot') inference is hardwired into the scalar presupposition of even, alongside the superlative inference, the mirror imaged one ('below the standard' / 'a little') is cancellable for only. We propose that this inference can be derived from the interaction of the superlative scalar presupposition of only and domain based constraints on alternatives in C. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Denić (2018, 2019, To appear) observes that the availability of distributive inferences—for sentences with disjunction embedded in the scope of a universal quantifier—depends on the size of the domain quantified over as it relates to the number of disjuncts. Based on her observations, she argues that probabilistic considerations play a role in the computation of implicatures. In this paper we explore a different possibility. We argue for a modification of Denić's generalization, and provide an explanation that is based on intricate logical computations but is blind to probabilities. The explanation is based on the observation that when the domain size is no larger than the number of disjuncts, universal and existential alternatives are equivalent if distributive inferences are obtained. We argue that under such conditions a general ban on 'fatal competition' (Magri 2009a,b, Spector 2014) is activated, thereby predicting distributive inferences to be unavailable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates interpretations of the Japanese initial mora-based minimizer "X.Y..."-no "X"-no ji-mo 'lit. even the letter "X" of "X.Y...".' Although initial mora-based minimizers have a literal interpretation of ji 'letter', they have a non-literal interpretation as well. The non-literal interpretation has several distinctive features that are not present in ordinary minimizers. First, it is highly productive in that various expressions can appear in the form "X.Y..."-no "X"-no ji. Second, non-literal minimizers typically co-occur with predicates that relate to knowledge, information, concepts, thought, and habituality, as seen in the corpus data (Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese [BCCWJ]). I argue that in the non-literal use, X refers to the minimum on the scale of the main predicate concerning "X.Y...". I suggest that the non-literal use was developed as a result of the conventionalization of the pragmatic inference derived from the literal reading, and that the co-occurrence with predicates related to knowledge, information, knowledge, concepts, thought, or habituality is due to the interpretation of "X.Y...", which were originally interpreted as letters as an abstract concept. The theoretical implication of this study is that, in addition to a non-compositional (lexically specified) minimizer whose scale is lexically fixed (e.g., give a damn, lift a finger), there also exists a compositional (lexically unspecified) minimizer in natural language, whose scale is specified via the predicate with which the minimizer co-occurs. The last section of this paper briefly discusses similar/related phenomena in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Korean, and English from a cross-linguistic perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a compositional analysis of Mandarin universal wh's in construction with an additive/scalar adverb ye 'also/even'. In the analysis, universal force is derived from exhaustification of the subdomain alternatives activated by wh-items under stress, and the tendency of wh-ye to appear in negative sentences is explained by the interaction between ye and domain widening. Specifically, the ye in wh-ye is argued to be a scalar ye imposing a total order presupposition on its associated set of alternatives. In wh-ye it associates with the domain argument of the wh, and the requirement can be met by either an ordered wh or a two-point scale 〈 D ′ , D 〉 made available through domain widening, specifically by widening of QUDs. The negative preference follows from the fact that a QUD is most naturally widened when it is settled negatively, as in the case of negatively biased questions with minimizers/maximizers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we aim to account for the distribution and interpretation of a novel class of free choice items in Romanian, which we refer to as additive free choice items (ADD-FCIs). We show that the internal composition of ADD-FCIs, as well as their distribution, differs from that attested for other free choice paradigms discussed in the literature. Morphologically, ADD-FCIs are a more complex variant of regular universal FCIs, by virtue of an additional morpheme. This morpheme plays an additive role when it functions as a stand-alone particle, and we propose that its role is similarly additive when it functions as an infix in ADD-FCIs. Couched in an exhaustification framework, we put forward a novel compositional account that can derive the interpretation of these ADD-FCIs. As for their distribution, these elements are only found in the presence of the conditional mood, as well as unconditional structures. We show how our analysis, coupled with the Viability Constraint used to explain the distribution of regular FCIs, can also account for their restricted distribution. In doing so, we further show how the pattern we investigate opens new perspectives regarding the licensing of free choice items in unconditionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Breheny et al. (Nat Lang Semant, 2017) argue against the structural approach to alternatives. The empirical force of their argument comes mostly from challenges raised against Trinh and Haida (Nat Lang Semant 23:249-270, 2015). This paper aims to respond to these challenges, showing how they can be met by a natural refinement of Trinh and Haida’s proposal which turns out to capture additional facts previously not accounted for. Another aim of this paper is to recount the debate with enough precision and explicitness in order to enhance understanding and facilitate future discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concentrates on giving precise content to the general wisdom on the scalar presupposition of even, according to which the prejacent of even, p, is stronger than its relevant focus alternatives, q. To that end I first examine both familiar challenges for the popular 'comparative likelihood' view of the 'stronger than' relation, as well as novel challenges, having to do with the context dependency of even (with entailed and non-entailed alternatives) and with its sensitivity to standards of comparison. To overcome these challenges and to account for the full range of data I develop a revised, 'gradability-based' scalar presupposition for even, which differs from the 'comparative likelihood' one in several respects: instead of directly comparing degrees to which propositions (namely p and q) are more or less likely, we compare extents to which non-focus entities x in p and q (in the accessible p worlds and the exhaustified q worlds) exceed the salient standard on a scale associated with a contextually supplied gradable property G. To capture cases where information about contrastive topics is crucial for fixing two distinct standards on G, I follow theories which view even as a general, two-place alternative-sensitive operator, allowing it to associate with both focus and contrastive topics. Beyond the ability to account for a large range of intricate felicity variations and inferences found with even, a more general contribution of the paper lies in showing the linguistic relevance of tools originally developed in the literature on gradable predicates to the semantics of scalar alternative-sensitive particles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the interpretation and distribution of universal Free Choice (FC) items, such as English FC any or Spanish cualquiera. Crosslinguistically, universal FC items can be characterized as follows. First, they have a restricted distribution. Second, they express freedom of choice: the sentence You can take any card conveys the information that the addressee is free to pick whichever card she chooses. Under standard assumptions, the truth conditions of sentences like You can take any card are taken to be captured by formalizations in which a universal quantifier ranging over individuals has wide scope over the possibility modal. The crucial observation that informs the account in this paper is that this type of formalization cannot capture the freedom of choice component. I will argue that in order to derive the right interaction between possibility modals and FC items, we need to add an exclusiveness condition to the standard wide scope paraphrases. The same proposal that guarantees freedom of choice will automatically account for the distribution restrictions of FC items. The formal implementation of this proposal is cast in the Hamblin semantics proposed in Kratzer and Shimoyama (Indeterminate phrases: The view from Japanese, 2002). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper refutes the widespread view that disjunctions of imperatives invariably grant free choice between the actions named by their disjuncts. Like other disjunctions they can also express a correlation with some factual distinction (fact-dependent reading), but as with modalized declaratives used for non-assertive speech acts this needs to be indicated explicitly. A compositional analysis of one such indicator, depending on, constitutes the point of departure for a uniform analysis of disjunctions across clause types. Disjunctions are analyzed as sets of propositional alternatives that correlate with a partition that the speaker may or may not be able to indicate explicitly. Free choice arises as the specific case where the partition is induced by the preferences of the addressee (understood as necessarily consistent effective preferences/'goals'). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inferences that result from exhaustification of a sentence S depend on the set of alternatives to S. In this paper, we present some inference patterns that are problematic for previous theories of alternatives and propose some structural constraints on the derivation of formal alternatives which derive the observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crosslinguistically, questions frequently make crucial use of morphosyntactic elements which also occur outside of questions. Chief among these are focus, disjunctions, and wh-words with indefinite semantics. This paper provides a compositional account of the semantics of wh-, alternative, and polar questions in Yucatec Maya (YM), which are composed primarily of these elements. Key to the account is a theory of disjunctions and indefinites (extending work by others) which recognizes the inherently inquisitive nature of these elements. While disjunctions and indefinites are inquisitive, they differ from questions since they are also truth-conditionally informative. Compositionally, then, the role of focus in YM questions is to presuppose the informative component of an indefinite wh-word or disjunction, rendering the inquisitive component the question's only new contribution to the discourse. In addition to deriving question denotations compositionally, the account also captures a potentially surprising fact: focused disjunctions in YM can function as either questions or assertions, depending solely on the discourse context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence of contrastive focus on pronouns interpreted as bound variables is puzzling. Bound variables do not refer, and it is therefore unclear how two of them can be made to contrast with each other. It is argued that this is a problem for both alternative-based accounts such as Rooth's (Nat Lang Semantics 1:75-116, ) and givenness-based ones such as Schwarzschild's (Nat Lang Semantics 7:141-177, ). The present paper shows that previous approaches to this puzzle face an empirical problem, namely the co-occurrence of additive too and focus on bound pronouns. Our account is based on the idea that the alternatives introduced by focused bound pronouns denote individuals. Putting forward the novel concept of compositional reconstruction, we show that a suitably modified Roothian analysis of focus licensing allows us to get bound pronouns to contrast with other bound pronouns. The reason for this is that the number of potential alternatives increases. We also suggest a modification of Rooth's ~-operator: contrastiveness becomes a requirement of the operator, which is modelled as a definedness condition. It is argued that in the case of focused bound pronouns a ~-operator is necessarily inserted in the scope of the quantifier. If this is on the right track, it follows that the phenomenon of focused bound pronouns warrants both an operator interpreting focus as well as a semantic value for the contribution of focus. Any givenness-based analysis must include these two ingredients as well; we suggest a way in which this can be implemented more or less straightforwardly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an analysis of metalinguistic comparatives such as more dumb than crazy in which they differ from ordinary comparatives in the scale on which they compare: ordinary comparatives use scales lexically determined by particular adjectives, but metalinguistic ones use a generally-available scale of imprecision or 'pragmatic slack'. To implement this idea, I propose a novel compositional implementation of the Lasersohnian pragmatic-halos account of imprecision-one that represents clusters of similar meanings as Hamblin alternatives. In the theory that results, existential closure over alternatives mediates between alternative-sets and meanings in which imprecision has been resolved. I then articulate a version of this theory in which the alternatives are not related meanings but rather related utterances, departing significantly from Lasersohn's original conception. Although such a theory of imprecision is more clearly 'metalinguistic', the evidence for it from metalinguistic comparatives in English is surprisingly limited. The overall picture that emerges is one in which the grammatical distinction between ordinary and metalinguistic comparatives tracks the independently motivated distinction between vagueness and imprecision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The structural approach to alternatives (Katzir in Linguist Philos 30(6):669-690, 2007; Fox and Katzir in Nat Lang Semant 19(1):87-107, 2011; Katzir in Semantics, pragmatics and the case of scalar implicatures, Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp 40-71, 2014) is the most developed attempt in the literature at solving the symmetry problem of scalar implicatures. Problematic data with indirect and particularised scalar implicatures have however been raised (Romoli in Snippets 27:14-15, 2013; Trinh and Haida in Nat Lang Semant 25(4):249-270, 2015). To address these problems, Trinh and Haida (2015) proposed to augment the theory with the Atomicity Constraint. Here we show that this constraint falls short of explaining minimal variants of the original problems, and moreover that it runs into trouble with the inferences of sentences involving gradable adjectives like full and empty. We furthermore discuss how the structural approach suffers at times from the problem of ‘too many lexical alternatives’ pointed out by Swanson (Linguist Philos 33(1):31-36, 2010), and at other times from the opposite problem of ‘too few lexical alternatives’. These three problems epitomise the challenge of constructing just enough alternatives under the structural approach to solve the symmetry problem in full generality. Finally, we also sketch another recent attempt at solving the symmetry problem, Bergen et al. (Semant Pragmat 9(20), 2016), which is based on relative informativity and complexity. We argue that Bergen et al. do not provide a general solution to the symmetry problem either, by pointing to some of the open problematic cases that remain for this approach as well. We conclude that while important progress has been made in the theory of alternatives for scalar implicatures in the last few years, a full solution to the symmetry problem has not yet been attained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present evidence that preschool children oftentimes understand disjunctive sentences as if they were conjunctive. The result holds for matrix disjunctions as well as disjunctions embedded under every. At the same time, there is evidence in the literature that children understand or as inclusive disjunction in downward-entailing contexts. We propose to explain this seemingly conflicting pattern of results by assuming that the child knows the inclusive disjunction semantics of or, and that the conjunctive inference is a scalar implicature. We make two assumptions about implicature computation in the child: (i) that children access only a proper subset of the adult alternatives (specifically, they do not access the lexicon when generating alternatives), and (ii) that children possess the adult capacity to strengthen sentences with implicatures. As a consequence, children are expected to sometimes not compute any implicatures at all, but in other cases they are expected to compute an implicature that is different from the adult implicature. We argue that the child's conjunctive strengthening of disjunctive sentences realizes the latter possibility: the adult infers that the conjunction is false but the child infers that the conjunction is true. This behaviour is predicted when our assumptions about child development are coupled with the assumption that a covert exhaustive operator is responsible for strengthening in both the child and the adult. Specifically, children's conjunctive strengthening is predicted to follow from the same mechanism used by adults to compute conjunctive free choice implicatures in response to disjunctive permission sentences (recursive exhaustification). We furthermore argue that this parallel between the child and the adult extends to disambiguation preferences. In particular, we present evidence that children prefer to strengthen disjunctions to conjunctions, in matrix and embedded positions (under every); this result mirrors previous findings that adults prefer to compute free choice, at the root and under every. We propose a disambiguation strategy that explains the preference for conjunctive strengthening - by both the child and the adult - even though there is no general preference for exhaustification. Specifically, we propose that the preference for a conjunctive strengthening follows from a pragmatic preference for a complete answer to the Question Under Discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present an argument for revising the theory of alternatives for Scalar Implicatures and for Association with Focus. We argue that in both cases the alternatives are determined in the same way, as a contextual restriction of the focus value of the sentence, which, in turn, is defined in structure-sensitive terms. We provide evidence that contextual restriction is subject to a constraint that prevents it from discriminating between alternatives when they stand in a particular logical relationship with the assertion or the prejacent, a relationship that we refer to as symmetry. Due to this constraint on contextual restriction, discriminating between alternatives in cases of symmetry becomes the task of focus values. This conclusion is incompatible with standard type-theoretic definitions of focus values, motivating our structure-sensitive definition instead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes an analysis of imperatives and possibility and necessity statements that (i) explains their differences with respect to the licensing of free choice any and (ii) accounts for the related phenomena of free choice disjunction in imperatives, permissions, and other possibility statements. Any and or are analyzed as operators introducing sets of alternative propositions. Free choice licensing operators are treated as quantifiers over these sets. In this way their interpretation can be sensitive to the alternatives any and or introduce in their scope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]