Speaker: Omri Doron (MIT)
Title: A typological argument against lexical cumulativity
Time: Wednesday, December 4, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: In this talk, I develop and motivate a new implementation of an old idea about the contrast between acceptable Hurford disjunctions (HDs) like (i) and unacceptable ones like (ii) (e.g. Gazdar 1979) — the idea that (i) is good because its simpler alternative (iii) would trigger an optional not all inference that is avoided by using (i), whereas (ii) has no analogous advantage over its weaker disjunct (e.g. Gazdar 1979). A straightforward implementation of this “Manner approach” in terms of ambiguity avoidance runs into a series of problems pointed out by Meyer (2013, 2014). Meyer therefore develops an alternative account of the contrast in (i)/(ii), based on the idea that exhaustification creates a contradiction when faced with alternatives that are contextually, but not logically entailed by its prejacent.
(i) Ann did some or all of the problem sets.
(ii) #Ann went to France or to Paris.
(iii) Ann did some of the problem sets.
In this talk, I will first argue against Meyers logicality-based alternative to the Manner approach and then introduce an implementation of the Manner approach that avoids some (although not all) of the problems she discusses. It relies not on ambiguity avoidance, but on a trade-off between the Gricean submaxim *Be brief!* and a submaxim I call *Be precise!*, which encodes a dispreference for utterances that are imprecise, i.e. that depend on the QUD for their truth conditions in the sense discussed by Kri & Spector (2021). To motivate *Be precise!*, I will take a short detour to the pragmatics of plurals and *all*. Returning to HDs, I will argue that it is possible to view (iii) as imprecise and (i) as a strategy to avoid imprecision, if we adopt the view that exhaustification is syntactically obligatory, but alternative pruning is restricted by the QUD in the way proposed by Bar-Lev (2020). Time permitting, I will conclude by discussing an open problem for this approach, which has to do with the status of ignorance inferences in HDs.