The Grice Club

Welcome

The Grice Club

The club for all those whose members have no (other) club.

Is Grice the greatest philosopher that ever lived?

Search This Blog

Thursday, February 15, 2018

Disimplicature

Speranza

The additive presupposition of particles like "too"/"even" is uncontested, but usually stipulated.

Grice proposes to derive it based on two properties. 

(i) "too"/"even" is cross-linguistically focus-sensitive, and (ii) in many languages, "too"/"even" builds negative polarity items and free-choice items as well, often in concert with other particles. (i) is the source of its existential presupposition, and 

(ii) offers clues regarding how additivity comes about. (i)-(ii) together demand a sparse semantics for "too/even," one that can work with different kinds of alternatives (focus, subdomain, scalar) and invoke suitably different further operators.

No comments:

Post a Comment