Partition by exhaustification: comments on Dayal 1996
Name
partition by exh.pdf
Description
Accepted version
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570.51 KB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
bf4b1772ffefe783de0791126b07b951
Author(s)
Fox, Danny
Date Issued
2018
Journal
ZAS Papers in Linguistics
Publisher
University Library J. C. Senckenberg
Citation
Fox, Danny. 2018. "Partition by exhaustification: comments on Dayal 1996." ZAS Papers in Linguistics, 60.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
In this paper I argue for a new constraint on questions, namely that a questiondenotation (a set of propositions) must map to a partition of a Stalnakerian Context-Set bypoint-wise exhaustification (point-wise application of the function Exh). The presuppositionthat Dayal attributes to an Answer operator follows from this constraint, if we assume a fairlystandard definition of Exh (Krifka, 1995). But the constraint is more restrictive therebyderiving the sensitivity of higher order quantification to negative islands (Spector, 2008).Moreover, when combined with recent proposals about the nature of Exh – designedprimarily to account for the conjunctive interpretation of disjunction (e.g. Bar-Lev and Fox,2017) – Dayal’s presupposition follows only in certain environments. This observationallows for an account of the “mention-some” interpretation of questions that makes specificdistributional predictions.Keywords: exhaustivity, Free Choice, maximality, higher-order quantification, mentionsome,negative-islands, partition, scalar implicatures, uniqueness.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.21248/ZASPIL.60.2018.474
