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Oddness and Conjunction

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Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Approaches on Implicatures and Presuppositions

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition ((PSPLC))

Abstract

In this chapter, the authors discuss the oddness effects arising from certain kinds of scalar sentences and review two main accounts to the oddness of these sentences: an account that explains oddness as an effect of a contextually contradictory scalar implicature and an alternative account that explains oddness based on the pragmatic usability of alternatives. They discuss the oddness behavior of conjunctive variants of the original cases which have been argued to be problematic for the account based on the mismatching scalar implicature. They argue that such variants are similarly problematic for the alternative account. They contribute a novel observation that the oddness of the conjunctive variants is not as stable as that of the original cases. Finally, they sketch a possible account of the oddness of these cases based on a relevance implication procedure from the entire conjunctive sentence to single conjuncts.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A third approach to oddness is proposed in Katzir and Singh (2015). We leave a discussion of their approach against the conjunction problem for future research.

  2. 2.

    An alternative proposal within the scalar implicature approach is in Meyer (2013). In essence, the way she accounts for the oddness of sentences like (5) is also as a mismatch between common knowledge and scalar implicatures; but, differently from Magri, she allows two possible implicatures for (5): more precisely, (5) can have the implicature also generated by Magri in (7) or the weaker epistemic implicature in (8). In either case it is easy to see that they conflict with the piece of common knowledge that if some of the players won, then all of them did.

    1. (7)

      It’s not true that all of the Portugal players won Euro 2016.

    1. (8)

      It’s not true that the speaker thinks that all of the Portugal players have won Euro 2016.

    As we will show below, Meyer’s variant of the account of oddness based on the mismatching scalar implicatures has the same problem as Magri’s version with the conjunctive case.

  3. 3.

    The approach based on a mismatching scalar implicature with common knowledge has also been challenged on various other grounds. Criticisms of Magri’s theory are presented in, e.g., Schlenker (2012), Katzir and Singh (2013), Romoli (2012) and Meyer (2013). In particular, Schlenker proposes to account for the oddness of cases such as (5) based on the notion of a mismatching scalar implicature with access to common knowledge. His idea has been challenged in Pistoia-Reda (2017), with respect to cases involving positive quantifiers, and in Magri (this volume) in connection with cases based on Hirschberg ordered sets.

  4. 4.

    Notice that Spector, unlike Magri, also predicts that (9) should give rise to oddness when uttered, for the same reason that explained the oddness of (5) above: the alternative, i.e. (5), is contextually equivalent to the target sentence. And indeed (9) also doesn’t sound unquestionably felicitous, especially when compared with sentences such as 13 or 14.

    1. (13)

      The Portugal players have won Euro 2016

    1. (14)

      Portugal has won Euro 2016.

  5. 5.

    According to his intuition, the formally analogous (20) of (5) can be rebuffed with the text in (22), which is not the case for (21), formally analogous to (18). This behavior is taken by him as evidence that only (20), and not (21), generates the inference that not all of the boys ate the cake.

    1. (20)

      Some of the boys ate the cake

    1. (21)

      Some of the boys ate the cake and the ice-cream

    1. (22)

      You are wrong: the cake was actually eaten by all of the boys

  6. 6.

    Meyer’s version of the scalar implicature approach is also in trouble when accounting for the conjunction case in (18). This is because the procedure can generate even more non-problematic implicatures for (18): the same as Magri’s in (27) and the weaker one in (28). And neither of them contradicts common knowledge.

    1. (27)

      Not all of Portugal players have won Euro 2016 and are tall.

    1. (28)

      It’s not true that the speaker thinks that all of Portugal players have won Euro 2016 and are tall.

  7. 7.

    Magri (2016) also discusses data that similarly point to the instability of the oddness of the conjunctive cases: he considers cases like (31) and submits that they are more felicitous than their counterpart without the contextual manipulation introduced by the preceding sentence.

    1. (31)

      The Portugal players have won Euro 2016. Some of them have won Euro 2016 and are tall.

  8. 8.

    See Gotzner and Romoli (2016) and Crnic (2016) for discussion of some problematic cases of Fox’s constraint.

  9. 9.

    This possibility seems to us to be in line with the proposal in Katzir and Singh (2015). In their proposal, the oddness of the original cases is derived based on the violation of some discourse conditions, in particular the question and the answer conditions.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS), Berlin, Germany

    Salvatore Pistoia-Reda

  2. University of Ulster, Coleraine, UK

    Jacopo Romoli

Authors
  1. Salvatore Pistoia-Reda
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  2. Jacopo Romoli
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS), Berlin, Germany

    Salvatore Pistoia-Reda

  2. University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy

    Filippo Domaneschi

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Pistoia-Reda, S., Romoli, J. (2017). Oddness and Conjunction. In: Pistoia-Reda, S., Domaneschi, F. (eds) Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Approaches on Implicatures and Presuppositions. Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50696-8_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50696-8_3

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