Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2016 / A puzzle for theories of redundancy: Exhaustification, incrementality, and the notion of local context

A puzzle for theories of redundancy: Exhaustification, incrementality, and the notion of local context

Paper · 2016 · Clemens Mayr and Jacopo Romoli

Summary

The paper addresses a puzzle for redundancy-based theories of assertability (Stalnaker, Fox, Schlenker, Singh, Chierchia, Meyer, Katzir & Singh). A disjunction of the shape "not p, or (p and q)" sounds natural. An example is Mary not being pregnant, or being so with the fact not showing. Yet it conveys the same information as the shorter "not p, or q," so every existing theory wrongly marks the inserted "she is (pregnant)" as redundant. The parallel conditional, where the repeated material is inserted after an "if p" antecedent, is bad, as those theories predict. The authors argue that the disjunction can be exhaustified, meaning it receives a scalar-implicature strengthening. Under exhaustification, the middle piece stops being redundant. They give two formal implementations:

  • one built on Fox's incremental redundancy, with Meyer's constraint on how exhaustification and redundancy interact;
  • one built on Schlenker's (2009) incremental local contexts.

The second implementation handles realistic alternative sets better. It also cannot be reproduced in dynamic semantics. The result therefore offers a way to tell apart two theories of local context that agree on presupposition projection.

Key points

  • Global redundancy (brevity). A sentence is blocked if it is contextually equivalent to a simplification of itself. A simplification is obtained by replacing nodes with their subconstituents. Order effects show that this must be made incremental.
  • First solution. It combines Fox's (2008, 2013) incremental redundancy, which does not use local contexts, with Meyer's (2013) "efficiency." Efficiency builds on Katzir's structural complexity and forbids ignoring covert operators.
  • Second solution. In Schlenker's (2009) system, the local context of the middle conjunct normally consists only of those worlds in the global context where the first disjunct is false. Under exhaustification it becomes the full global context, so the conjunct is no longer locally redundant.
  • Comparison with dynamic semantics. Dynamic semantics (Heim 1983, Beaver 2001) computes local contexts recursively over syntax and cannot derive this shift. Schlenker's approach can.
  • A predicted overgeneration and its fix. Take a negated conjunction ¬(p ∧ q) where p entails q. Exhaustifying it yields ¬p ∧ q. That outcome is excluded by a condition that both negated conjuncts must remain possible. The sentence is therefore correctly ruled out on both parses.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. An expression's redundancy is not fixed: it depends on whether the whole sentence carries its strengthened (implicature-enriched) meaning, so redundancy checks should run on the enriched reading as well as the literal one.
  • I2. A part's local context is defined by which worlds still matter for the truth of the whole, and this can change when the global meaning changes.
  • I3. Minimal pairs that differ only in connective (disjunction vs. conditional vs. negated conjunction) serve as a diagnostic between theories that agree elsewhere.
  • I4. An apparent overgeneration is blocked by an independent assertability condition, namely that each alternative disjunct must stay live, rather than by patching the core rule.
  • I5. Brevity is defined via simplification, that is, replacing a node with one of its subconstituents and comparing meanings in context.

For Mova

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

  • I1 (frames): prag could re-check flagged "redundant" clauses after computing scalar implicatures, instead of treating them as noise or as a misparse.
  • I2 (world): when the world builder evaluates an embedded clause, it could recompute that clause's local context from the final (possibly exhaustified) sentence meaning, rather than inheriting it mechanically from the tree.
  • I3 (learn): build negative-control test sets of such triplets, so that a pragmatic module which "works" on one form cannot silently overgenerate on the others.
  • I4 (back): the generator could reject outputs whose implicature-enriched meaning forces one disjunct false, which keeps the main redundancy filter simple.
  • I5 (back): the text → graph → text compressor could use exactly this subtree-replacement test to prune redundant clauses while keeping an explainable reason for each deletion.

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

🎓University of YorkYork · United Kingdom13 works · 6,512 citations🔬Institut Jean NicodParis · France6 works · 1,359 citations🎓University of UlsterColeraine · United Kingdom5 works · 130 citations

Also on the byline: University of East Anglia · Ziekenhuis aan de Stroom.

📚 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

Cite

Cite as Clemens Mayr and Jacopo Romoli. 2016. A puzzle for theories of redundancy: Exhaustification, incrementality, and the notion of local context. Semantics and Pragmatics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3765/sp.9.7

@article{mayr2016puzzle,
  title = {{A puzzle for theories of redundancy: Exhaustification, incrementality, and the notion of local context}},
  author = {Clemens Mayr and Jacopo Romoli},
  journal = {Semantics and Pragmatics},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.3765/sp.9.7},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.9.7}
}

References

47 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Abusch, Dorit. 2002. Lexical alternatives as a source of pragmatic presupposition. In Brendan Jackson (ed.), Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 12, 1–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/salt.v12i0.2867. ↗
  2. Beaver, David I. 2001. Presupposition and assertion in dynamic semantics. Stanford University: CSLI Publications. find
  3. Büring, Daniel. 2003. On D-Trees, beans, and B-Accents. Linguistics and Philosophy 26(5). 511–545. http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1025887707652. ↗
  4. Chemla, Emmanuel. 2008. Similarity: Towards a unified account of scalar implicatures, free choice permission and presupposition projection. Unpublished manuscript, École Normale Supérieure, Paris and MIT. http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/WI1ZTU3N/Chemla-SIandPres.html. ↗
  5. Chemla, Emmanuel & Philippe Schlenker. 2012. Incremental vs. symmetric accounts of presupposition projection: An experimental approach. Natural Language Semantics 20(2). 177–226. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11050-012-9080-7. ↗
  6. Chierchia, Gennaro. 2004. Scalar implicatures, polarity phenomena, and the syntax/pragmatics interface. In Adriana Belletti (ed.), Structures and beyond: The cartography of syntactic structures, 39–103. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ↗
  7. Chierchia, Gennaro. 2009. On the explanatory power of dynamic semantics. Handout from Sinn und Bedeutung 14. find
  8. Chierchia, Gennaro, Danny Fox & Benjamin Spector. 2012. The grammatical view of scalar implicatures and the relationship between semantics and pragmatics. In Paul Portner, Claudia Maienborn & Klaus von Heusinger (eds.), Semantics: An international handbook of natural language meaning, vol. 3, 2297–2331. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. von Fintel, Kai. 2012. Conditionals. In Klaus von Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn & Paul Portner (eds.), Semantics: An international handbook of natural language meaning, vol. 3, 1515–1538. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. find
  9. Fox, Danny. 2007. Free choice and the theory of scalar implicatures. In Uli Sauerland & Penka Stateva (eds.), Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics, 71–120. Basingstoke: Palgrave. ↗
  10. Fox, Danny. 2008. Two short notes on Schlenker’s theory of presupposition projection. Theoretical Linguistics 34(3). 237–252. http://dx.doi.org/10. 1515/THLI.2008.016. A puzzle for theories of redundancy Fox, Danny. 2013. Presupposition projection from quantificational sentences: Trivalence, local accommodation, and presupposition strengthening. In Ivano Caponigro & Carlo Cecchetto (eds.), From grammar to meaning: The spontaneous logicality of language, 201–232. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ↗
  11. Fox, Danny & Roni Katzir. 2011. On the characterization of alternatives. Natural Language Semantics 19(1). 87–107. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/ s11050-010-9065-3. ↗
  12. Franke, Michael. 2011. Quantity implicatures, exhaustive interpretation, and rational conversation. Semantics and Pragmatics 4(1). 1–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.4.1. ↗
  13. Gazdar, Gerald. 1979. Pragmatics: implicature, pressuposition, and logical form. New York, NY: Academic Press. find
  14. George, Benjamin. 2008. Presupposition repairs: A static, trivalent approach to predicting projection. Los Angeles, CA: University of California, Los Angeles MA thesis. find
  15. Geurts, Bart. 1996. Local satisfaction guaranteed: A presupposition theory and its problems. Linguistics and Philosophy 19(3). 259–294. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00628201. ↗
  16. Groenendijk, Jeroen & Martin Stokhof. 1984. Studies on the semantics of questions and the pragmatics of answers. University of Amsterdam dissertation. find
  17. Heim, Irene. 1983. On the projection problem for presuppositions. In Daniel P. Flickinger (ed.), West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL) 2, 114–125. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. find
  18. Heim, Irene. 1990. Presupposition projection. In Rob van der Sandt (ed.), Presupposition, lexical meaning, and discourse processes: Workshop reader. University of Nijmegen. find
  19. Heim, Irene. 1992. Presupposition projection and the semantics of attitude verbs. Journal of Semantics 9(3). 183–221. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jos/ 9.3.183. ↗
  20. Horn, Laurence R. 1972. On the semantic properties of logical operators in English. Los Angeles, CA: University of California, Los Angeles dissertation. find
  21. Hurford, James R. 1974. Exclusive or inclusive disjunction. Foundations of Language 11(3). 409–411. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25000785. ↗
  22. Karttunen, Lauri. 1974. Presupposition and linguistic context. Theoretical Linguistics 1(1–3). 181–194. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/thli.1974.1.1-3.181. ↗
  23. Clemens Mayr & Jacopo Romoli Katzir, Roni. 2007. Structurally-defined alternatives. Linguistics and Philosophy 30(6). 669–690. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10988-008-9029-y. ↗
  24. Katzir, Roni & Raj Singh. 2014. Hurford’s disjunctions: Embedded exhaustification and structural economy. In Urtzi Etxeberria, Anamaria Fǎlǎuş, Aritz Irurtzun & Bryan Leferman (eds.), Sinn und Bedeutung 18, 201–216. University of the Basque Country. find
  25. Klinedinst, Nathan. 2012. Totally hardcore semantic presuppositions. Unpublished manuscript, University College London. find
  26. Magri, Giorgio. 2009. A theory of individual-level predicates based on blind mandatory scalar implicatures. Natural Language Semantics 17(3). 245– 297. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11050-009-9042-x. ↗
  27. Magri, Giorgio. 2011. Another argument for embedded scalar implicatures based on oddness in downward entailing environments. Semantics and Pragmatics 4(6). 1–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.4.6. ↗
  28. Mayr, Clemens & Jacopo Romoli. 2013. Locally useless, globally informative: Redundancy and scalar implicatures. Handout for From Grammar to Meaning workshop, Vitoria-Gasteiz. find
  29. Meyer, Marie-Christine. 2013. Ignorance and grammar. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology dissertation. find
  30. Meyer, Marie-Christine. 2015. Redundancy and embedded exhaustification. In Sarah D’Antonio, Mary Moroney & Carol Rose Little (eds.), Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 25. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/salt.v25i0.3486. ↗
  31. Roberts, Craige. 1989. Modal subordination and pronominal anaphora in discourse. Linguistics and Philosophy 12(6). 683–721. http://dx.doi.org/10. 1007/BF00632602. ↗
  32. Romoli, Jacopo. 2012. Soft but strong: Neg-raising, soft triggers, and exhaustification. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University dissertation. van Rooij, Robert & Katrin Schulz. 2004. Exhaustive interpretation of complex sentences. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 13(4). 491–519. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10849-004-2118-6. ↗
  33. Rooth, Mats. 1992. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 1(1). 117–121. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF02342617. ↗
  34. Rothschild, Daniel. 2011. Explaining presupposition projection with dynamic semantics. Semantics and Pragmatics 4(3). 1–43. http://dx.doi.org/10. 3765/sp.4.3. van der Sandt, Rob. 1992. Presupposition projection as anaphora resolution. Journal of Semantics 9(4). 333–377. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jos/9.4.333. A puzzle for theories of redundancy Sauerland, Uli. 2004. Scalar implicatures in complex sentences. Linguistics and Philosophy 27(3). 367–391. http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/B:LING.0000023378. 71748.db. ↗
  35. Sauerland, Uli. 2012. The computation of scalar implicatures: Pragmatic, lexical or grammatical? Language and Linguistics Compass 6(1). 36–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/lnc3.321. ↗
  36. Schlenker, Philippe. 2007. Anti-dynamics: Presupposition projection without dynamic semantics. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 16(3). 325–356. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10849-006-9034-x. ↗
  37. Schlenker, Philippe. 2008. Be articulate: A pragmatic theory of presupposition projection. Theoretical Linguistics 34(3). 157–212. http://dx.doi.org/10. 1515/THLI.2008.013. ↗
  38. Schlenker, Philippe. 2009. Local contexts. Semantics and Pragmatics 2(3). 1–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.2.3. ↗
  39. Simons, Mandy. 2000. Issues in the semantics and pragmatics of disjunction. New York, NY: Garland. find
  40. Simons, Mandy. 2001. On the conversational basis of some presuppositions. In Rachel Hastings, Brendan Jackson & Zsofia Zvolenszky (eds.), Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 11, 431–448. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/salt. v11i0.3099. ↗
  41. Singh, Raj. 2007. Assertability constraints and absurd assertions. Unpublished manuscript, MIT. http://http-server.carleton.ca/~singhr/files/singh-assertability.pdf. ↗
  42. Singh, Raj. 2008. On the interpretation of disjunction: Asymmetric, incremental, and eager for inconsistency. Linguistics and Philosophy 31(2). 245–260. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10988-008-9038-x. ↗
  43. Singh, Raj. 2011. Maximize presupposition! and local contexts. Natural Language Semantics 19(2). 149–168. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11050-010-9066-2. ↗
  44. Soames, Scott. 1989. Presupposition. In Dov Gabbay & Franz Guenther (eds.), Handbook of philosophical logic, vol. IV, 553–616. Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing Company. find
  45. Spector, Benjamin. 2007. Scalar implicatures: Exhaustivity and Gricean reasoning. In Maria Aloni, Alastair Butler & Paul Dekker (eds.), Questions in dynamic semantics, 225–249. Amsterdam & Boston, MA: Elsevier. find
  46. Spector, Benjamin. 2009. Scalar implicatures – the neo-gricean approach. Class handout, University of Vienna. find
  47. Stalnaker, Robert C. 1979. Assertion. Syntax and Semantics 9. Clemens Mayr & Jacopo Romoli Jacopo Romoli School of Communication Ulster University Shore Road Newtownabbey BT370QB UK j.romoli@ulster.ac.uk Clemens Mayr Center for General Linguistics (ZAS) Schützenstr. 18 10117 Berlin Germany mayr@zas.gwz-berlin.de find

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/mayr-2016-puzzle-theories-redundancy-exhaustification-incrementality/