Résumé en anglais du document de synthèse
TRAVAUX SOUMIS POUR l'HABILITATION
(Pour avoir accès aux autres de mes travaux, on peut consulter cette page)
1. Scalar Implicatures, Blindness and Common Knowledge – Comments on Magri 2011, in Reda, Salvatore Pistoia. Pragmatics, Semantics and the Case of Scalar Implicatures. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
I discuss and criticize an argument put forward by Giorgio Magri in a number of recent papers (Magri 2009, 2011) supporting the view that scalar implicature computation is an automatic process that is blind to contextual information – a view that does not seem consistent with Gricean accounts of scalar implicatures. My main argument will be that the data that Magri uses as evidence for the blindness view are part of broader generalizations that Magri’s account does not capture. I will suggest an alternative account, based on two distinct principles. The first principle states that a sentence is infelicitous if its alternatives are all trivial, in a sense made precise. The second principle appeals to a notion of 'meaning contribution' and is based on a distinction between two kinds of contextual equivalence: cases where two expressions are equivalent relative to common knowledge should be distinguished from cases where two expressions are equivalent relative to the the speaker’s public beliefs (i.e. the beliefs such that it is common knowledge that the speaker has them).
2. Bare Numerals and Scalar Implicatures, Language and Linguistics Compass, 2013
This is for the most part a review article, except for the last part which provides an argument for the existence of embedded exhaustification.
3. With Gennaro Chierchia & Danny Fox, Scalar Implicature as a Grammatical Phenomenon , In An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning Semantics, vol 3 eds. P. Portner, C. Maienborn et K. von Heusinger, Mouton de Gruyter. [Circulated under the title “The Grammatical View of Scalar Implicatures and the Relationship between Semantics and Pragmatics”], 2012.
The main original contribution is the argument for embedded exhaustification from Hurford's constraint, which we had developed partly independently from each other. This part of the paper is presented independently in this publication:
Hurford's Constraint and the Theory of Scalar Implicatures, in Paul Egré & Giorgio Magri, eds. Presuppositions and Implicatures. Proceedings of the MIT-Paris Workshop, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 60, 2009.
4. Aspects of the Pragmatics of Plural Morphology: On Higher-Order Implicatures, in U. Sauerland & P. Stateva (eds.), Presuppositions and Implicatures in Compositional Semantics, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007.
This paper argues that the plurality inference associated with plural indefinites (i.e. 'John read some novels by Balzac' implies that John read several novels by Balzac) is a kind of scalar implicature which derives from a competition with the pragmatically strengthened meaning of the singular alternative. On this view, this inference is a higher-order implicature. This mechanism can also be implemented in terms of recursive exhaustification.
5. Scalar Implicatures: Exhaustivity and Gricean Reasoning, In M. Aloni, A. Butler & P. Dekker (eds.), Questions in Dynamic Semantics, Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface, Elsevier, 2007.
This paper offers a rigorous formalization of the Gricean derivation of scalar implicatures, in terms of inferences about speakers epistemic states. It shows that, under certain conditions, the result of this pragmatic process is equivalent to what results from applying an exhaustivity operator whose definition has roots in Groenendijk & Stockhof's work.
6. Global Positive Polarity Items and Obligatory Exhaustivity, Semantics and Pragmatics 7:11, p. 1-61, doi:10.3765/sp.7.11, published on November 25, 2014.
I argue for a distinction between two types of positive polarity items (PPIs) which has not been recognized so far. While for some PPIs, anti-licensing is a strictly local phenomenon, for other PPIs anti-licensing should be stated as a global condition. I aim to contribute to a principled explanation for the distribution of a significant subset of global PPIs, by relating it to specific semantic properties of the relevant items. More specifically, I argue that PPIs such as soit...soit, quelques, and almost, trigger obligatory exhaustivity effects and scalar inferences, and that independently motivated constraints regarding the generation of such inferences can account for their distribution. The paper also briefly addresses the case of other global PPIs, e.g., at least, for which a similar account is not straightforwardly available.
7. Being simultaneously an NPI and a PPI: a bipolar item in French, in Snippets 25, March 2012.
A short note on a French item that is both an NPI and a PPI
8. WIth Paul Egré [Spector is first author] A Uniform Semantics for Embedded Interrogatives: An answer, not necesarily the answer. [To appear (with minor revisions) in Synthese]
[New version from October 2014, just accepted with minor revisions].
Our paper addresses the following question: is there a general characterization, for all predicates P that take both declarative and interrogative complements (responsive predicates in Lahiri’s 2002 typology), of the meaning of the P-interrogative clause construction in terms of the meaning of the P-declarative clause construction? On our account, if P is a reponsive predicate and Q a question embedded under P, then the meaning of ‘P+Q’ is, informally, “to be in the relation expressed by P to some potential complete answer to Q”. We show that this rule allows us to derive veridical and non-veridical readings of embedded questions, depending on whether the embedding verb is veridical, and provide novel empirical evidence supporting the generalization. We then enrich our basic proposal to account for the presuppositions induced by the embedding verbs, as well as for the generation of weakly exhaustive readings of embedded questions.
9. With Marta Abrusan, A Semantics for Degree Questions Based on Intervals: Negative Islands and their Obviation, in Journal of Semantics 28(1), 2011 [Near-final draft of the published paper]
We show that a semantics for degree questions based on intervals of degrees is able to account for negative islands as well as for their obviation in certain configurations. We furthermore argue that such a semantics is independently motivated.
10. An unnoticed reading for wh-questions: quantified elided answers and weak islands, In Linguistic Inquiry 39(4), 2008.
In this LI squib, I show that wh-questions which contain a necessity modal or an attitude verb give rise to an ambiguity which had not be recognized. This provides evidence for the view that wh-phrases can optionally bind higher-order variables. The resulting reading is shown to be subject to weak island effect. This paper develops an idea that was initially discussed in publication #12.
11. Modalized Questions and Exhaustivity, in Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 17 (SALT 17), CLC publications, Cornell University, 2007.
I argue that the pragmatics of modified numerals of the form 'more than n' can receive a satisfactory treatment in a framework where exhaustification makes reference to a question under discussion and where wh-questions can be assigned a higher-order reading in the sense of publication #11.
12. With Paul Marty [first author] and Emmanuel Chemla, Phantom readings: the case of modified numerals, Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, doi:10.1080/23273798.2014.931592, published on line on June 27, 2014.
This paper investigates the semantic mechanisms proposed to account for the complex behavior of simple numerical expressions (e.g., ‘three students’), which are ambiguous between a doubly-bounded reading (e.g., ‘exactly three students’) and a lower-bounded reading (e.g., ‘at least three students’). These mechanisms are expected to further apply to more complex numerical expressions of the form ‘between n and m’ (e.g., ‘between three and five students’). We note that these expressions are thus similarly predicted to be ambiguous between a doubly-bounded reading (e.g., ‘at least three and at most five students’) and a lower-bounded reading (e.g., ‘at least three students’). The lower-bounded reading does not surface at the introspective level, but results from three offline experiments and a response time study provide evidence in favor of this existence. Our contribution is thus twofold. On the experimental side, we present two experimental methods powerful enough to detect what we call phantom readings, i.e. readings that have behavioral consequences even though they are not accessed introspectively. On the theoretical side, we show that some abstract semantic mechanisms which might be thought to overgenerate readings are in fact accurate.
13. With Paul Marty [first author] and Emmanuel Chemla, Interpreting numerals and scalar items under memory load, Lingua 133 (2013): 152-163.
A sentence such as ‘John has four children’ can be interpreted as meaning either that John has at least four children (weak reading), or that John has exactly four children (strong reading). On the classical neo-Gricean view, this ambiguity is similar to the ambiguity generated by scalar terms such as ‘some’, for which both a weak reading (i.e., some or all) and a strong reading (i.e., some but not all) are available. On this view, the strong reading of numerals, just like the strong reading of ‘some’, is derived as a scalar implicature, taking the weak reading as semantically given. However, more recent studies have found substantial differences between the two phenomena. For instance, the syntactic distribution of the strong reading is not the same in both cases, and young children’s performance in certain specific tasks has suggested that they acquire the strong reading of numerals before they acquire the strong reading of standard scalar items. Using a dual task approach, we provide evidence for another type of difference between numerals and standard scalar items. We show that tapping memory resources has opposite effects on bare numerals and on ‘some’. Under high cognitive load, participants report fewer implicatures for sentences involving ‘some’ (compared to low cognitive load conditions), but they report more strong readings for sentences involving bare numerals. We discuss the implications of this result for current theoretical debates regarding the semantics and pragmatics of numerals.
14. With Emmanuel Chemla, Experimental Evidence for Embedded Scalar Implicatures, in Journal of Semantics 28(3), 2011.
We describe an experimental methodology to detect embedded scalar implicatures which are not detected otherwise.
15. With Clemens Mayr, Not Too Strong! Generalizing the Scope Economy Condition, in Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 14 (2009).
Fox (1995, 2000) argued that covert scope shifting operations (CSSOs) such as QR or reconstruction are subject to a semantic economy condition: they are not li- censed if they are semantically vacuous. In this paper, we argue for a generalization of this condition according to which a CSSO is ruled out not only if it is vacuous, but also if it leads to a reading that is strictly stronger than the surface-scope reading.
16. WIth Yasutada Sudo, Presupposed Ignorance and Exhaustification: how presuppositions and scalar implicatures interact, Ms. (just submitted).
We investigate the interactions between scalar implicatures and presuppositions in sentences containing both a scalar item and presupposition trigger. We will discuss three theories, namely, (i) Gajewski and Sharvit’s multi-dimensional theory, (ii) a natural extension of the ‘standard’ theory of scalar implicatures, and (iii) our own theory. Although the first two theories have some appealing features, we point out that they fall short of accounting for certain empirical facts, in particular: a) the interaction between prosody and monotonicity, and b) what we call presup- posed ignorance. In order to account for these novel observations, we postulate two mechanisms of scalar strengthening, the Presupposed Ignorance Principle and the exhaustivity operator (Exh).
17. Comparing Exhaustivity Operators (Minimal Worlds vs. Innocent Exclusion), Ms., September 2014, submitted to Semantics and Pragmatics [I uncovered a substantial but fixable problem with one aspect of the paper, and will have a new version soon]
In this paper, I investigate the formal relationships between two types of exhaustivity operators that have been discussed in the literature, one based on minimal worlds/models. Together with other results, this provides a method for simplifying, in some cases, the computation associated with the 'minimal exclusion' operator. Besides clarifying the formal relationships between both types of operators, the results reported here will be shown to have practical and possibly theoretical relevance.