Past Event: Monday Colloquium: Alternatives in focus (Aron Hirsch, University of Maryland)

Talk Abstract:

Only applies to a proposition, p, presupposes that p is true, and asserts that alternatives to p are false.  But, what alternatives does only exclude?  In (1), uttered out of the blue, only can exclude the alternative in (1a) to convey that Al slept and did not run.  Yet, it cannot exclude (1b) to convey that Al did run.  (1b) contains negation, and is not an alternative for only here.

(1) Al only slept.

   a. Al ran. 

  b. Al did not run.

Fox & Katzir (2011) propose that the grammar disallows alternatives which are more structurally complex than the prejacent.  (1b) is more complex, due to the presence of negation.  Yet, in this talk, we show that there are cases where structurally more complex alternatives are attested (adding to e.g. Trinh & Haida 2015, Hirsch & Schwarz 2023, Schwarz & Wagner 2023, 2024).  Based on these data, we will pursue an approach where the grammar generates alternatives independent of their complexity, and take the distribution of complex alternatives to be regulated pragmatically by the Question Under Discussion (as in Roberts 1996, Beaver & Clark 2008, Katzir 2023).

This talk is joint work with Bernhard Schwarz (McGill).