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Presuppositional exhaustification

Paper · 2021 · Itai Bassi, Guillermo Del Pinal and Uli Sauerland

Summary

Grammatical theories of scalar implicatures (SIs) place a silent operator, exh, in Logical Form. Exh asserts its prejacent together with the denial of relevant excludable alternatives. Bassi, Del Pinal and Sauerland propose replacing it with pex. Pex keeps the prejacent as asserted content but makes the negated alternatives a presupposition.

The work is purely theoretical, with no new corpus or experiment. It re-examines known judgments, including the findings of Gotzner & Benz (2018). The authors combine pex with existing principles of presupposition projection (a Strong Kleene system) and of local and global accommodation. This yields one account of several puzzles:

  • the mixed inferences of "some under some" sentences,
  • SIs under negative factives,
  • the rarity of SIs under negation and other downward-entailing operators,
  • Magri-style oddness, where an obligatory implicature contradicts the common ground.

A natural objection is that SIs do not feel presupposed. The authors answer that pex, like only and even, has its presupposition accommodated automatically whenever it is consistent with the common ground. The proposal matters because it moves SIs out of flat asserted meaning and into a layered, non-at-issue tier.

Key points

  • pex is defined as the mirror image of overt only (Horn 1969). Only presupposes the prejacent and asserts exhaustivity, while pex does the reverse. Without the assertion/presupposition split, pex, exh and only are equivalent.
  • Following Magri (2009), pex attaches obligatorily at least once to every propositional structure. Whether a given SI appears is controlled by a contextual relevance predicate R, not by an optional operator.
  • In the example where a subset of the girls each located part of their marbles, a Local SI can coexist with a Weak Global SI (some girl found none), as Chierchia (2004) observed. The authors derive this from Strong Kleene projection of pex presuppositions.
  • An obligatory SI that clashes with the common ground cannot be globally accommodated, which explains Magri-style oddness. Spelling out the same content explicitly behaves differently, because explicit content can revise the common ground.
  • On Schlenker's (2007) view of presupposition triggering, a conjunctive meaning needs one conjunct presupposed. Pex and only satisfy this requirement, but flat exh does not. The paper appeared in Semantics and Pragmatics 14, article 11.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Implied "not all" content is stored on a separate presupposition-like tier and projects by its own rules, rather than being merged into the main claim.
  • I2. An exhaustifier is always present, and a relevance filter decides which alternatives it actually negates. This replaces guessing whether an implicature is "switched on".
  • I3. Oddness is treated as a clash between obligatory implied content and shared background knowledge, not as falsity of the literal claim.
  • I4. Global accommodation is automatic only when the presupposed content is consistent with the context; otherwise the utterance becomes infelicitous.
  • I5. Overt only and covert exhaustification share one meaning and differ just in which part is asserted versus presupposed.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): The implicature module in prag could tag each SI as a non-at-issue inference with its own projection behavior. Negation or embedding would then not wrongly strip or keep it.
  • I2 (frames): Computing alternatives always, then filtering them by question-under-discussion relevance, gives a deterministic and explainable trace for every implicature drawn or skipped.
  • I3 (world): When an SI contradicts the compiled knowledge (e.g., facts about all members of a class), the world builder can flag the sentence as odd. It should not silently revise its knowledge base.
  • I4 (world): Pex-style inferences could be added to the text's world state only after a consistency check, with failures logged as explainable anomalies.
  • I5 (back): A generator could choose between implicit "some" and explicit "only/not all" phrasing, depending on whether the exclusion should be at-issue in the output text.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyCambridge · United States159 works · 65,157 citations🎓University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignUrbana · United States108 works · 67,432 citations🎓University of Massachusetts AmherstAmherst Center · United States67 works · 64,591 citations🔬Leibniz-Centre General LinguisticsBerlin · Germany4 works · 54 citations

📚 Shelves 5The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 9,086 worksArtificial Intelligence · 8,889 worksArts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPhilosophy · 211 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Implicature · 72 works

Cite

Cite as Itai Bassi, Guillermo Del Pinal and Uli Sauerland. 2021. Presuppositional exhaustification. Semantics and Pragmatics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3765/sp.14.11

@article{bassi2021presuppositional,
  title = {{Presuppositional exhaustification}},
  author = {Itai Bassi, Guillermo {Del Pinal} and Uli Sauerland},
  journal = {Semantics and Pragmatics},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.3765/sp.14.11},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.14.11}
}

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