In many unrelated languages, there is a containment relation between definite plurals and all-type plural universal quantifiers (UQs) — for instance, the surface form all the books contains the plural definite the books. While some languages have plural UQ structures that do not contain overt definiteness marking (e.g. German alle Bücher), the reverse asymmetric pattern—a definite-plural structure properly containing a UQ structure—is (to my knowledge) unattested. This cross-linguistic asymmetry led Matthewson (2001), Winter (2001) and others to hypothesize that UQs are associated with "bigger" structures than definite plurals. In principle, this could be implemented in terms of syntactic selection within the extended NP or by constraining the lexicalizable quantifier meanings such that the semantic argument of UQs must be an individual (cf. Matthewson 2001).
In the first part of this talk, I will argue that both cartographic and lexical-semantic approaches miss a broader generalization of which the definite/UQ asymmetry is a special case. Recent work in plural semantics (Malamud 2012, Križ 2015, Križ & Spector 2021 a.o.) has focused on imprecision, a form of semantic underspecification that gives rise to QUD-driven variation between stronger and weaker readings (cf. Lasersohn’s (1999) "pragmatic slack"), and to truth-value gaps in case both the stronger and the weaker readings are relevant. I will argue that across several syntactic categories and semantic types, imprecise expressions correspond to less complex structures than their precise counterparts.
In the second part of the talk, I provide a pragmatic account of this generalization in terms of a trade-off between two principles that could be viewed as grammaticalized submaxims of the Gricean maxim of Manner—"Be brief!" and "Be precise!" I formalize "Be brief!" using Katzir’s (2007) notion of structural complexity and introduce a particular way of modeling the QUD-dependency of imprecise expressions, due to Križ & Spector (2021), to formalize "Be precise!" I assume that "Be brief!" and "Be precise!" belong to a larger set of interacting Manner-related constraints, such that a sentence is blocked if it is not Pareto-optimal with respect to the constraints in this set. I further show that to fully derive the generalization, we need to assume a very liberal (and somewhat non-Gricean) precondition for the relevant form of pragmatic competition: Two sentences should compete whenever there is some way of choosing the QUD that makes them contextually equivalent.
The third part of the talk attempts to provide independent evidence for the proposal by looking at exceptional cases in which the two competing expressions are on a par with respect to either complexity or precision, so that the proposed constraint interaction predicts one of them to be clearly dispreferred. The resulting theoretical picture is such that Manner-related pragmatic preferences can constrain the way the grammar is organized. If correct, this provides a way of deriving some cartographic asymmetries, but also a "bottom-up" method for identifying pragmatic preferences: If two truth-conditional sentences S and S’ are both acceptable even though S is structurally less complex, then there must be some independent pragmatic preference that favors S’. If time permits it, I will conclude by briefly discussing how this method can be applied to "Maximize Presupposition" effects (Heim 1991, Sauerland 2008 a.o.) and how "Be precise!" interacts with our preference for stronger presuppositions.