On the role of causation in sufficiency and excess
Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine
January 2025 

This paper concerns different conceptualizations for degree constructions of sufficiency and excess in English, with enough and too. According to many prior works, a sufficiency conveys that a measured degree meets or exceeds a minimum degree for some purpose (meeting-the-minimum), whereas an excessive conveys that a measured degree strictly exceeds a maximum degree for some purpose (exceeding-the-maximum). I will instead advocate for a causation-based conceptualization for sufficiency and excess, building on Schwarzschild 2008 and Grano 2022. Together with the monotonicity property of gradable predicates, I show that the causation-based descriptions can derive much of their respective truth conditions without stipulating the connection between sufficiency and meeting-the-minimum and between excess and exceeding-the-maximum as in previous accounts. I then present the facts from certain edge cases where the proposals diverge in their predictions; these prove to be problematic for the classic descriptions for these constructions, but are unproblematic for the causation-based formulation.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008736 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	To appear in Edoardo Cavirani and Anastasiia Vyshnevska (eds.), Generative Perspectives on Degrees: The Semantics and Morphosyntax of Scalarity
keywords:	sufficiency constructions, excessive constructions, causation, causal sufficiency, degrees, monotonicity, semantics
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