Abstract
The paper concerns the expression of non-strict comparison, focusing in particular on constructions of the form [no(t) . . .-er than] in modified numerals. The main empirical finding is the observation that negated comparatives contrast with regular comparatives in that the former but not the latter can give rise to (scalar) implicatures. It is shown that such a contrast falls out of theories of exhaustive interpretation that claim alternatives to form dense scales. An important result is that the paper sharpens the desiderata for theories of exhaustification.
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Parts of this paper were presented at Sinn und Bedeutung 12 in Oslo. I am grateful to the audience for their comments and remarks. More in particular, I want to thank Jakub Dotlačil, Øystein Nilsen, Doris Penka, Hans-Christian Schmitz, and Magda Schwager for fruitful discussion. Thanks to Robert van Rooij for discussion during a presentation of this work in an earlier stage and to an anonymous reviewer for detailed and thought-provoking comments. This research was supported by a grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), which I gratefully acknowledge.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Nouwen, R. Upper-bounded no more: the exhaustive interpretation of non-strict comparison. Nat Lang Semantics 16, 271–295 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-008-9034-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-008-9034-2