Abstract
Scalar implicatures depend on alternatives in order to avoid the symmetry problem. I argue for a structure-sensitive characterization of these alternatives: the alternatives for a structure are all those structures that are at most as complex as the original one. There have been claims in the literature that complexity is irrelevant for implicatures and that the relevant condition is the semantic notion of monotonicity. I provide new data that pose a challenge to the use of monotonicity and that support the structure-sensitive definition. I show that what appeared to be a problem for the complexity approach is overcome once an appropriate notion of complexity is adopted, and that upon closer inspection, the argument in favor of monotonicity turns out to be an argument against it and in favor of the complexity approach.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.
References
Atlas J.D. and Levinson S. (1981). It-clefts, informativeness and logical form. In: Cole, P. (eds) Radical pragmatics, pp. Academic Press, New York
Blutner R. (2000). Some aspects of optimality in natural language interpretation. Journal of Semantics 17: 189–216
Chierchia, G. (2004). Scalar implicatures, polarity phenomena, and the syntax/pragmatics interface. In A. Belletti (Ed.), Structures and beyond. Oxford University Press.
Fox, D. (2006). Free choice and the theory of scalar implicatures. Ms., MIT.
Gamut, L. T. F. (1991). Logic, language, and meaning. Chicago University Press.
Gazdar G. (1979). Pragmatics: Implicature, presupposition and logical form. Academic Press, New York
Geurts, B. (2007). Scalar implicature and local pragmatics. URL http://www.ru.nl/ncs/bart/papers/globallocal.pdf. Ms., University of Nijmegen, May 2007.
Grice P. (1989). Studies in the way of words. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
Halle M., Marantz A. (1993). Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection. In: Hale K., Keyser J. (eds). The view from Building 20 (pp. 111–176). MIT Press.
Hirschberg, J. (1985/1991). A theory of scalar implicature. PhD Thesis, University of Pennsylvania, Garland, New York.
Horn, L. (1972). On the semantic properties of the logical operators in English. Doctoral Dissertation, UCLA.
Horn L. (1984). Toward a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q-based and R-based implicatures. In: Schiffrin, D. (eds) Meaning, form and use in context, pp 11–42. Georgetown University Press, Washington
Horn L. (1989). A natural history of negation. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Horn L. (2000). From IF to IFF: Conditional perfection as pragmatic strengthening. Journal of Pragmatics 32: 289–326
Kroch, A. (1972). Lexical and inferred meanings for some time adverbials. Quarterly Progress Reports of the Research Laboratory of Electronics 104. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT.
Landman F. (2000). Events and plurality: The Jerusalem lectures. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht
Levinson S. (2000). Presumptive meanings. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Marantz, A. (1997). No escape from syntax: Don’t try morphological analysis in the privacy of your own lexicon. In A. Dimitriadis, L. Siegel, C. Surek-Clark, & A. Williams, (Eds.), Proceedings of the 21st Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium, volume 4.2 of UPenn Working Papers in Linguistics, 201–225.
Matsumoto Y. (1995). The conversational condition on Horn Scales. Linguistics and Philosophy 18: 21–60
McCawley, J. D. (1978). Conversational implicatures and the lexicon. In P. Cole (Ed.), Syntax and semantics (Vol. 9: Pragmatics, pp. 245–259). New York: Academic Press.
Parikh P. (2000). Communication, meaning and interpretation. Linguistics and Philosophy 23: 185–212
Poser W.J. (1992). Blocking of phrasal constructions by lexical items. In: Sag, I. and Szabolsci, A. (eds) Lexical matters, pp 111–130. CSLI Publications, Stanford, CA
Russell B. (2006). Against grammatical computation of scalar implicatures. Journal of Semantics 23: 361–382
Sauerland U. (2004). Scalar implicatures in complex sentences. Linguistics and Philosophy 27: 367–391
Sevi, A. (2005). Exhaustivity: A semantic account of ‘quantity’ implicatures. Doctoral Dissertation, Tel-Aviv University.
Soames S. (1982). How presuppositions are inherited: A solution to the projection problem. Linguistic Inquiry 13: 483–545
Spector, B. (2007). Scalar implicatures: Exhaustivity and Gricean reasoning. In M. Aloni, A. Butler, & P. Dekker (Eds.), Questions in dynamic semantics (pp. 229–254). Elsevier.
van Rooij R. (2004). Signalling games select Horn strategies. Linguistics and Philosophy 27: 493–527
van Rooij R., Schulz K. (2004). Exhaustive interpretation of complex sentences. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 13: 491–519
von Fintel, K., & Fox, D. (2002). Classnotes for 24:954: Pragmatics in linguistic theory. DSpace. URL http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/36355.
Zipf G.K. (1949). Human behaviour and the principle of least effort. Addison-Wesley, Cambridge, MA
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Katzir, R. Structurally-defined alternatives. Linguist and Philos 30, 669–690 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-008-9029-y
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-008-9029-y