Numerals and their modifiers: How morphology constrains alternatives
Teodora Mihoc
May 2018 

Bare numerals (three), comparative-modified numerals (more/less than three), and superlative-modified numerals (at most/least three) differ in crucial ways with respect to bounding entailments, scalar implicatures, ignorance implicatures, and acceptability in downward-entailing environments. Many important strides have been made in deriving various subsets of their patterns, yet we still lack a unified account. In this paper I show that the key to such an account lies with the proper understanding of the contribution of the morphological pieces of these items – the numeral, much/little, and the comparative/superlative morpheme. From this we can not only obtain truth conditions that straightforwardly capture just the right bounding entailments for each item, but we can also naturally derive scalar and domain alternatives that yield just the desired scalar implicature, ignorance implicature, and acceptability in downward-entailing environments patterns. The account naturally shares features with existing alternative-based accounts of numerals, especially that of Spector (2015), but improves both empirically and conceptually on them all.

Format:	[ html ][ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/004033 (please use that when you cite this article)
keywords:	semantics, pragmatics, numerals, comparative, superlative, extents, scalar alternatives, domain alternatives, exhaustification, polarity
previous versions:	v1 [May 2018]
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