Talk by Yasutada Sudo (UCL), Thursday 11th 4-6 pm
We are very happy to announce the next talk in the Semantic Colloquium, which will take place on Thursday, July 11, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301.
Yasutada Sudo (UCL) will present „The Plurality Inference as a Non-Propositional Quantity Implicature“.
Abstract:
Plural nouns typically give rise to 'plurality inferences', e.g. "Andrew wrote papers" implies that Andrew wrote multiple papers, not just one. Howevder, plurality inferences are not always present, e.g. "Andrew did not write papers" does not mean the same thing as "Andrew did not write multiple papers". There are three types of approaches to the plurality inference: (i) the scalar implicature approach (Spector 2007, Zweig 2009, Ivlieva 2013, Mayr 2015), (ii) the ambiguity approach (Farkas & de Swart 2010, Grimm 2013, Martí 2018), and (iii) the antipresupposition approach (Sauerland 2003, Sauerland et al. 2005). In this talk, I will propose a new scalar implicature account. The idea of the scalar implicature account is that the plural is semantically number-neutral, and the...