TY - JOUR
T1 - Superlative Quantifiers and Meta-Speech Acts
AU - Cohen, Ariel
AU - Krifka, Manfred
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgments A. C. gratefully acknowledges support of the Israel Science Foundation, Grant # 376/09. M. K. gratefully acknowledges support by the Bundesminsterium für Bildung und Forschung (Projektförderung Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Förderkennzeichen 01UG0711) and by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Sonderforschungsbereich 632 “Informationsstruktur”. We are both deeply thankful to Barbara Partee, Anita Mittwoch, and two anonymous reviewers for extremely helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
PY - 2014/1/1
Y1 - 2014/1/1
N2 - Recent research has shown that the superlative quantifiers at least and at most do not have the same type of truth conditions as the comparative quantifiers more than (Geurts and Nouwen, Language 83:533-559, 2007) and fewer than. We propose that superlative quantifiers are interpreted at the level of speech acts. We relate them to denegations of speech acts, as in I don't promise to come, which we analyze as excluding the speech act of a promise to come. Calling such conversational acts that affect future permissible speech acts "meta-speech acts," we introduce the meta-speech act of a GRANT of a proposition as a denial to assert the negation of that proposition. Superlative quantifiers are analyzed as quantifiers over GRANTS. Thus, John petted at least three rabbits means that the minimal number n such that the speaker GRANTs the proposition that John petted n rabbits is n = 3. We formalize this interpretation in terms of commitment states and commitment spaces, and show how the truth conditions that are derived from it are partly entailed and partly conversationally implicated. We demonstrate how the theory accounts for a wide variety of distributional phenomena of superlative quantifiers, including the contexts in which they can be embedded.
AB - Recent research has shown that the superlative quantifiers at least and at most do not have the same type of truth conditions as the comparative quantifiers more than (Geurts and Nouwen, Language 83:533-559, 2007) and fewer than. We propose that superlative quantifiers are interpreted at the level of speech acts. We relate them to denegations of speech acts, as in I don't promise to come, which we analyze as excluding the speech act of a promise to come. Calling such conversational acts that affect future permissible speech acts "meta-speech acts," we introduce the meta-speech act of a GRANT of a proposition as a denial to assert the negation of that proposition. Superlative quantifiers are analyzed as quantifiers over GRANTS. Thus, John petted at least three rabbits means that the minimal number n such that the speaker GRANTs the proposition that John petted n rabbits is n = 3. We formalize this interpretation in terms of commitment states and commitment spaces, and show how the truth conditions that are derived from it are partly entailed and partly conversationally implicated. We demonstrate how the theory accounts for a wide variety of distributional phenomena of superlative quantifiers, including the contexts in which they can be embedded.
KW - At least
KW - At most
KW - Commitment development spaces
KW - Conversational implicature
KW - Denegation
KW - Embedded speech acts
KW - GRANT
KW - Meta speech acts
KW - Speech acts
KW - Superlative quantifiers
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84897034203&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s10988-014-9144-x
DO - 10.1007/s10988-014-9144-x
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84897034203
SN - 0165-0157
VL - 37
SP - 41
EP - 90
JO - Linguistics and Philosophy
JF - Linguistics and Philosophy
IS - 1
ER -