Whamit!

Any current theory of pragmatic meaning relies on reasoning over alternatives, i.e. sentences that could have been uttered instead. However, recent work points to the need for ‘Conceptual Alternatives’, which are alternative meanings that are built from concepts that do not have a corresponding linguistic form (Buccola, Križ and Chemla 2021). In this talk, I discuss the Conceptual Alternative hypothesis from the point of view of three studies I have done on the topic: two of them are on the implicated presupposition of anti-duality of “all”, which look at data from French and Ecuadorian Siona, which are two languages without a word for “both”, but differ with respect to whether the word for “all” is anti-dual. The third is a language acquisition study, which looks at whether children can derive implicatures that exclude an alternative meaning M before they have learned the words that mean M.