Griceian Exhaustivity

by JLS
for the GC

In "Exhaustivity: A Semantic Account of 'Quantity' Implicatures" A. Sevi argues against Grice's approach to both scalar and clausal implicature. He offers an alternative theory of these implicatures, which derives them based on a semantic operation of exhaustivization.

The exhaustivity operator makes reference to the structure of the semantic domain it operates on.

It requires the domain to have the structure of a join semilattice.

Exhaustivity may operate on the partial order in the domain of singular and plural objects, or the context may provide other structured domains of interpretation, and hence other orders and maximality operations (orders of numbers, ranks, properties, relations etc.).

Sevi's theory also provides a principled account of the dependence of scalar implicatures on focal structure, and of scalar implicatures in logically complex sentences ('implicature projection').

A. Sevi is an instructor in the Brain Sciences program at Bar- Ilan University. He received his Ph.D. in linguistics from Tel Aviv University in 2006, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar Ilan University.