the week of october 15

exhaustive interpretations from elsewhere

We considered the possibility that the exhaustive interpretations we perceive have a variety of distinct sources, and looked at two unrelated mechanisms that are already widely assumed to involve 'minimal' or exhaustive interpretations: Davidsonian event predication has a built-in minimality requirement, and contrastive focus plus a low boundary tone induces exhaustive interpretations via exclusion of contextual alternatives. After establishing that some, but not all, types of exhaustive interpretations require contrastive focus, we explored how big a chunk of standard exhaustivity data automatically falls out from the kind of minimality that is inherent in any current semantics that relies on Davidsonian event predication or works with minimal exemplifying situations. Here is the combined and revised handout for Wednesday and Friday.

Our discussion this week was exploratory and tentative. Apart from showing you live what it is like to grope in the dark, it gave you a good opportunity to familiarize yourself with those properties of event or situation-based analyses that are not that widely known, and are thus not usually exploited by linguists working on scalar implicatures or exhaustive interpretations. The reason seems to be a purely sociological accident. Linguists who are interested in event semantics or minimal exemplifying situations do not tend to work on implicatures and vice versa. Davidsonian event semantics is by now recognized as important for theories of argument structure, aktionsarten, aspect, direct perception reports, plurality and adverbial modification. Minimal exemplifying situations have become popular in contemporary accounts of 'donkley pronouns' and adverbial quantification. Intonational facts commonly take the back seat in semantic or pragmatic discussions. They tend to be set aside since they are difficult to investigate with untrained eyes. This situation is gradually changing. See e.g. Noah Constant's UC Santa Cruz MA thesis: English Rise-Fall-Rise: A study in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Intonation, which includes sound files.