Diagnosing the presuppositional properties of scalar implicatures
Jad Wehbe, Omri Doron
March 2025
 

Existing accounts of scalar implicatures (SIs) treat them as post-semantics inferences (Grice, 1975) or as part of the asserted meaning (Chierchia et al., 2009), but these views have recently been challenged based on evidence that in certain environments, SIs behave like presuppositions (Bassi et al., 2021). In this paper, we provide additional evidence for the presuppositional approach by showing that SIs are sensitive to constraints on presupposition accommodation (Heim, 2015; Doron and Wehbe, 2022). In addition, we show that even when the implicature trigger is embedded in a downward-entailing environment and the implicature does not strengthen the overall meaning, we can detect the contribution of a presuppositional implicature. We take this to provide evidence against both the Gricean perspective and the assertive exh perspective.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/008880
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 29
keywords: presuppositions, implicatures, global accommodation, semantics
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