Similative Plurals and the Nature of Alternatives

Abstract

Standard approaches to implicature hold that scalar implicatures arise when listeners enrich the basic meaning of a speakers utterance by reasoning over a constrained set of alternatives to that utterance (Grice 1975; Horn 1978; Geurts 1998, a.o.). For example, a sentence like Rostam ate some of the cookies implies that Rostam did not eat all of the cookies because, so the reasoning goes, the speaker could have uttered the stronger sentence Rostam ate all of the cookies, but chose not to. On this view, then, alternatives are 1) calculated on the basis of entire utterances, and 2) derived via replacement of certain expressions in the utterance with other expressions in the lexicon of the language (Katzir 2007). In this dissertation, I challenge this view on the basis of the semantic and prag- matic properties of an understudied variety of plural, similative plurals, focusing on m-reduplication in Persian and the morphemes -toka and -tari in Japanese as case studies. These expressions are associated with a non-homogeneous plural inference: they refer to a plural entity composed of at least one entity in the denotation of the bare nominal to which the plural applies, and at least one entity in a set that is in some sense similar to the set denoted by the bare nominal. Using evidence from downward-entailing semantic contexts, as well as pragmatic contexts involving speaker ignorance, I demonstrate that this inference is not entailed by similative plurals, but is merely implicated. My proposed analysis of the non-homogeneous plural implicature has major con- sequences for the theory of implicatures. First, in order to derive this implicature, calculation must occur within the syntactic structure prior to existential closure of the event variable, and is thus a case of subsentential implicature calculation (Land- man 2000; Chierchia 2004; Zweig 2009). Furthermore, the analysis of one set of speaker’s judgments calls for the use of an abstract alternative, one that does not correspond to any lexical item of the languages in question (Chemla 2007; Buccola et al. 2018; Charlow 2019). This alternative cannot be derived via a series of deletion and lexical replacement operations on the structural representation of the sentence under evaluation, and thus poses a problem for theories requiring alternatives to be derived by such means (Katzir 2007). Instead, I propose that the required alternatives be derived from the conceptual representation of the expression. Following this, I extend the analysis to include other types of non-homogeneous plurality, such as associative plurals and personal pronoun constructions, and demonstrate the existence of a common core in the semantics of non-homogeneous plurals.