The presupposition of "even"
Linmin Zhang
November 2022 

I present a new observation with regard to the felicity of using "even": There is no apparent focus/QUD congruence for "even"-sentences. For example, "even Mary came" cannot be used to answer a question like "who came" or "who was unlikely to come". Instead, the felicitous use of "even Mary came" is to address issues like "how successful the exhibition was", "how enthusiastic people were", "how urgent the matter was", etc. Thus I propose that the use of "even" is QUD-sensitive, always with regard to a contextually salient degree question. "Even" brings a degree-based presupposition of additivity, not an entity-based one (see also Greenberg 2018 for a similar view). An "even"-sentence presupposes that its prejacent is associated with a degree value, a benchmark value higher than the usual contextual threshold, resolving a degree question with an increasingly positive answer. E.g., under a relevant scenario about how popular a certain talk was, "even Mary came" is roughly interpreted as "(the talk was so popular) that Mary came". Under the current analysis, the entity-based additivity and likelihood-based scalarity of "even", which are considered presuppositions under the traditional view, are now considered implicatures.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/006760 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Submitted to the Proceedings of SALT 32
keywords:	even, presupposition, question under discussion (qud), degree question, degree semantics, additivity, likelihood, gradable predicate, scale, interval, informativeness, semantics
previous versions:	v2 [September 2022] v1 [August 2022]
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