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Factive islands and meaning-driven unacceptability

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Abstract

It is often proposed that the unacceptability of a semantically interpretable sentence can be rooted in its meaning. Elaborating on Oshima (in Washio T, et al (eds) New frontiers in artificial intelligence, Springer, Berlin, 2007), we argue that the meaning-driven unacceptability of factive islands must make reference to felicity conditions, and cannot be reduced to the triviality of propositional content. We also observe, again elaborating on Oshima, that the triviality of factive islands need not be logical, but can be relative to a listener’s background assumptions. These findings call for a revision of a prevalent view about meaning-driven unacceptability, according to which unacceptability results from triviality that is both propositional and logical.

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Correspondence to Bernhard Schwarz.

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For comments and discussion, we thank the members of the McGill Semantics Reading Group and those who stopped by our poster at NELS 46 at Concordia University. Special thanks to Brian Buccola, Dan Goodhue, and Aron Hirsch. The first author acknowledges support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Grants #435-2013-0103 and #435-2016-1448; and from Fonds de Recherche du Québec—Société et Culture (FRQSC), Grant #2012-SE-144646. The second author acknowledges support from Labex EFL and the Research Foundation Flanders.

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Schwarz, B., Simonenko, A. Factive islands and meaning-driven unacceptability. Nat Lang Semantics 26, 253–279 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-018-9146-2

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