Two puzzles raised by oddness in conjunction

Giorgio Magri

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Magri (2009, 2011) argues that a sentence such as #Some Italians come from a warm country sounds odd because it triggers the scalar implicature that not all Italians come from a warm country, which mismatches with the fact that all Italians come from the same country. This squib looks at variants of these sentences where the main predicate is modified through conjunction in the scope of an existential quantifier, such as #Some Italians come from a warm country and are blond. These sentences are shown to raise two puzzles for a theory of oddness based on mismatching scalar implicatures. The first puzzle is that these variants sound odd despite the fact that no independently justifiable scalar alternative is able to trigger the mismatch. The second puzzle is that their oddness is sensitive to certain manipulations in the preceding discourse, violating the crucial assumption that mismatching implicatures are blind to context. The two puzzles are left unsolved.
Original languageEnglish
Number of pages18
JournalJournal of Semantics
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2014

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