Innocent Exclusion in an Alternative Semantics (2007)
BibTeX
@MISC{n.n.07innocentexclusion,
author = {n.n.},
title = {Innocent Exclusion in an Alternative Semantics},
year = {2007}
}
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Abstract
The exclusive component of unembedded disjunctions is standardly derived as a conversational implicature by assuming that or forms a lexical scale with and (Horn, 1972, Gazdar 1979). It is well-known, however, that this assumption does not suffice to determine the required scalar competitors of disjunctions with more than two atomic disjuncts (McCawley 1981, Simons 1998). To solve this, Sauerland 2004 assumes that or forms a lexical scale with two otherwise unattested silent connectives (L and R) that retrieve the left and right terms of a disjunction. A number of recent works have proposed an Alternative Semantics for indefinites and disjunction to account for their interaction with modals and other propositional operators (Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002, Alonso-Ovalle and Menéndez-Benito 2003, Kratzer 2005, Aloni 2002, Simons 2005, Alonso-Ovalle 2006). We note that the McCawley-Simons problem does not arise in an Alternative Semantics, because we can assume that the set of pragmatic competitors to a disjunction is the closure under intersection of the set of propositions that it denotes. An adaptation of the strengthening mechanism presented in Fox 2007 allows for the derivation of the exclusive component of disjunctions with more than two atomic disjuncts without having to rely on the L and R operators.
