Core Concepts and Indirect Alternatives: On the Anti-Duality of Quantifiers
Paloma Jeretič, Itai Bassi, Aurore Gonzalez, Marie-Christine Meyer, Kazuko Yatsushiro, Uli Sauerland
November 2023 

This paper proposes an analysis for the long-standing puzzle observed by Chemla (2007) regarding the anti-duality of the French universal quantifier tous, which arises even though French has no word for ‘both’ to feed a Maximize Presupposition competition. This phenomenon has been cited as an example in language where a dual ‘conceptual alternative’ is at play (Buccola et al., 2018), but no formal account of it has been put forth. Furthermore, a naive implementation of the idea overgenerates anti-duality inferences in other expressions, such as each, which and one in English and French, which might be expected to be observed due to anti-dual counterparts in some languages like Icelandic and Japanese. We propose an account where French tous has an unpronounceable dual universal alternative built from a dual core concept, competition with which is licensed by the existence of a pronounceable expression equivalent in meaning, which we call ‘Indirect Alternative’. This proposal accounts for tous’s anti-duality and lack of anti-n-ality for n > 2, as well as the lack of anti-duality in other quantifiers.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007694 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	submitted
keywords:	semantics, alternatives, anti-duality, maximize presupposition, core concepts, indirect alternatives, conceptual alternatives, quantifiers, semantics
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