Additive Presuppositions Are Derived Through Activating Focus Alternatives
Anna Szabolcsi
December 2017 

The additive presupposition of particles like TOO/EVEN is uncontested, but usually stipulated. This paper 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.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/003759 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Proceedings of Amsterdam Colloquium 2017
keywords:	additive, scalar, npi, fci, particle, presupposition, focus, semantics, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [November 2017]
Downloaded:	682 times

 

[ edit this article | back to article list ]