Abstract
This short note presents an empirical puzzle: the Vietnamese counterpart of any has two morphological variants, only one of which, namely the more complex one, is acceptable under an existential modal. The note then discusses a theory of any whose explanation of the acceptability of any under existential modals requires exhaustification. The Vietnamese fact is then shown to follow from the theory under the assumption that exhaustification has a bipartite syntax. The note ends with some open questions for further research.
This work is supported by the ERC Advanced Grant “Speech Acts in Grammar and Discourse” (SPAGAD), ERC-2007-ADG 787929. I thank Luka Crnič for fruitful discussion and two anonymous reviewers for comments which helped improve the paper.
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- 1.
The intended reading for the verb in (3) is episodic, not generic. Thus, the deviance will be clearer when the progressive aspect marker
is added and the sentence is embedded under
‘I saw,’ as exemplified in (i) below, whose intended reading is ‘I saw Nam reading a book.’
For an explanation of the acceptability of ANY under a generic reading of the verb which is compatible with what we will say below, see [23].
- 2.
- 3.
\(\top \) and \(\bot \) represent the tautology and the contradiction, respectively.
- 4.
The background motivation for this theory is a conflict between the Gricean Maxims, especially Quality and Quantity, which seem to be truisms about linguistic communication, and the observable fact that people can convey a proposition p, for example ‘John talked to Mary and not Sue,’ by uttering a sentence S whose literal meaning is prima facie a proposition q which is weaker than p, for example the sentence John talked to Mary. Essentially, the proponents of the EXH theory resolve this conflict by denying that S is the sentence being uttered. What is uttered, they say, is really EXH(R)(F(S))(S), which in fact conveys the stronger proposition p as its literal meaning. For more discussion on this issue see [27] and references therein.
- 5.
Thus, suppose we try to conjoin S consistently with the negation of as many sentences in A as possible. Those sentences which feature in every such trial that are not S are the elements of EXCL(S, A). Then, suppose we try to conjoin S and the negation of every sentence in EXCL(S, A) with as many sentences in A as possible. The sentences which feature in every such trial that are neither S nor elements of EXCL(S, A) are the elements of INCL(S, A).
- 6.
We assume that a sentence is grammatical if it has one parse which is grammatical, and is ungrammatical if it has no parse which is grammatical. Crnič, in [6,7,8], proposes formal constraints on R to guarantee that no parse which violates the licensing condition for any can be generated by the grammar. As far as I can see, this is necessary only if we want the grammar to be “crash-proof.” Note, also, that the account we are proposing does not concern how the value of R is determined. What it tells us is which values of R would make the sentence grammatical. In this sense it is similar to Binding Theory, which does not tell how a certain pronoun comes to carry an index in a discourse context, but does tell us which indices make the sentence grammatical.
- 7.
An anonymous reviewer asks why not say that BK carries EXH itself. The question is justified, and my answer would be that there is no reason not to say that BK is EXH itself if semantics is all we care about. However, we also care, minimally, about phonology: we do want to take into account at least the fact that BK is pronounced inside the DP, not clause initially. Saying that BK is an agreement reflex of a clause initial EXH is just a way of saying that BK is EXH but is not pronounced where it is interpreted, a prevalent phenomenon in natural language. Alternatively, we could say that BK undergoes covert movement. Discussing the relative merits and disadvantages of these two analyses would take us beyond the scope of this note.
- 8.
In fact, a bipartite analysis for ONLY has been proposed for Vietnamese [10].
- 9.
Here is the English example.
- (25):
-
*John is required to read any book
- 10.
English exhibits the same phenomenon, as pointed out by [8], which acknowledges it to be an unsolvable problem for the account proposed there.
- (27):
-
John is required to read any two books
The fact that in Vietnamese the presence of BK is obligatory might be instructive as it suggests exhaustification must play a part.
- 11.
The English translations of (30a) and (30b) capture rather precisely the “neutrality” of the former, which corresponds to a subject aux inversion question, and the “bias” of the latter, which corresponds to a “declarative question” in English [16, 17, 25]. One difference is that the biased question implies that there is contextual evidence for a ‘yes’ answer, while the neutral question does not have this implication.
- 12.
[28] proposes an account of this fact which is based on [15]. The account assumes that BK comes with a covert EVEN and that the question particle à has a semantics that is incompatible with EVEN. A unification of [28] and the account of BK-ANY under existential modals provided in this paper remains to be worked out.
is added and the sentence is embedded under
‘I saw,’ as exemplified in (i) below, whose intended reading is ‘I saw Nam reading a book.’
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Trinh, T. (2020). Bipartite Exhaustification: Evidence from Vietnamese. In: Deng, D., Liu, F., Liu, M., Westerståhl, D. (eds) Monotonicity in Logic and Language. TLLM 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12564. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-62843-0_11
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