Determiners, Conservativity, Witnesses
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fintel2018.pdf
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Author(s)
Keenan, Edward L
von Fintel, Kai
Date Issued
January 2018
Journal
Journal of Semantics
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Citation
von Fintel, Kai and Edward L. Keenan. "Determiners, Conservativity, Witnesses." Journal of Semantics 35, 1 (January 2018): 207–217 © 2018 The Author(s)
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
A cherished semantic universal is that determiners are conservative (Barwise & Cooper 1981; Keenan & Stavi 1986). Well-known problem cases are only (if it has determiner uses) and certain uses of proportional determiners like many (Westerståhl 1985). Fortuny (2017), in a retracted contribution to this journal, proposed a new constraint (the Witness Set Constraint) to replace Conservativity. He claimed that his constraint is satisfied by only and the Westerståhl-many, thus correctly allowing the existence of these non-conservative determiners, whilst it is not satisfied by unattested non-conservative determiners (such as allnon). In fact, we show here that only does not satisfy Fortuny’s Witness Set Constraint (nor does Westerståhl-many, which we leave to the readers to convince themselves of). Upon reflection, it turns out that the reason is simple: the Witness Set Constraint is in fact equivalent to Conservativity. There simply cannot be non-conservative determiners that satisfy the Witness Set Constraint. We consider further weakening of the Witness Set Constraint but show that this would allow unattested determiners.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffx018
