The aim of this paper is to propose a way to account for the scalar implicatures in non-monotonic environments. The fact that scalar implicatures obtain in non-monotonic contexts has been a puzzle, since an assertion and its scalar alternatives have no entailment relation, and therefore it is impossible to derive implicatures. As a solution I propose that scalar alternatives of an assertion with indefinite NPs, including both monotone increasing and non-monotonic ones, should maintain the coreference with the indefinite NPs of the assertion; otherwise entailment relations cannot hold. This move offers a viable alternative to the implicature computation not only in the non-monotonic environments but also in monotone increasing contexts.
목차
1. Introduction 2. Previous Analyses 2.1. Chierchia (2004) 2.2. Chierchia, Fox and Spector (2008) 3. Proposal 3.1. A Property of Indefinites 3.2. A Condition on Entailment 3.3. Explaining the Problematic Data 4. Concluding Remarks References