Neg-raising with belief predicates as a scaleless implicature
Paloma Jeretič
December 2022 

I propose a novel analysis for neg-raising (NR) with belief predicates, where the NR reading ‘think not’ is achieved as a scaleless implicature derived from applying an exhaustivity operator (from Bar-Lev & Fox 2020) to ‘not think’ and the subdomain alternatives projected by think. I show evidence that NR behaves like other types of implicatures derivable by the same operation (scalar implicatures, free choice, other scaleless implicatures), in particular in its sensitivity to the question under discussion and polarity of the environment. An implicature-based approach approximates NR’s behavior better than the prominent syntactic and presupposition-based accounts. This analysis revives Romoli’s (2013) proposal to treat the NR inference as an implicature while avoiding its undesirable theoretical assumptions.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007182 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Proceedings of SALT 32
keywords:	neg-raising, scaleless implicatures, belief predicates, exhaustification, semantics
previous versions:	v1 [December 2022]
Downloaded:	795 times

 

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