Exceptive-additive 'besides': a unified semantic treatment
Clemens Mayr, Ekaterina Vostrikova
December 2024 

This paper is about English exceptive-additive constructions introduced by ‘besides’. Like the better-studied pure exceptives introduced by ‘but’, ‘besides’ contributes an inference of exception when it occurs with quantifiers that exhibit universal force (e.g., ‘every’ or ‘no’). However, while exceptives are incompatible with quantifiers that have existential force, this is not the case for ‘besides’. In such contexts, ‘besides’ contributes an inference of addition. We propose a unified compositional account that explains the exceptive-additive behavior of ‘besides’ and its distinctions from exceptives like ‘but’. Our analysis extends the treatment of exceptives framed in terms of EXH (Gajewski 2013, Hirsch 2016, Crnič 2021) to exceptive-additives. We propose that, while both ‘besides’ and ‘but’ share a core contribution of domain subtraction, the methods for deriving alternatives differ between the two types of constructions. For quantificational claims with ‘but’, the alternatives are constructed by substituting the DP following ‘but’ with other DPs. In contrast, the only alternative for a quantificational claim with 'besides' that is distinct from the original claim has no subtraction at all. By reducing the set of alternatives, our account explains the compatibility of ‘besides’ with ‘exactly-n’ numerals and captures the additive inference observed in these cases. At the same time, it captures the exceptive-like behavior of ‘besides’ when paired with universal and negative quantifiers. To generalize this approach to all modified numerals, we adopt a decompositional theory of their semantics. According to this theory, modified numerals are treated as quantifiers over degrees that can optionally move at LF, leaving behind a constituent equivalent in meaning to an ‘exactly-n’ claim. We propose that the additive inference is computed under the scope of a numeral on this constituent. We suggest that a similar approach to the treatment of existential some can account for its interaction with ‘besides’. Finally, we extend our analysis to wh-questions, exploring the implications of applying EXH to weak answers.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008655 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	submitted
keywords:	exceptives, exceptive-additive, besides, quantification, modified numerals, exh
previous versions:	v3 [December 2024] v2 [December 2024] v1 [December 2024]
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