This paper discusses the distributive reading of plural superlatives. We argue that the compositional interpretation of plural superlative sentences requires that the referent of the superlative description is excluded from the comparison class associated with the degree morphology. We extend the claim to superlatives in general. The proposal implies that we need to rethink the presupposition c...

In this paper, we present a critique of the uniform treatment of nominal and adverbial quantification in van der Sandt’s binding theory of presuppositions. We develop an alternative account of adverbial quantification framed in terms of Beaver’s reconstruction of Karttunen’s satisfaction theory. This account provides a simpler characterization of adverbial quantification that does not require r...

This work deals with the semantics of the French additive aussi. We make the broad hypothesis that its semantics closely match those of its English equivalent too. Thus, we rely on the usual formal analysis given to too, but will use experimental data on aussi. A complete analysis would test both items to check for differences, although as far as our knowledge is concerned, the differences are ...

Computational aspects of Van der Sandt’s binding and accommodation theory (BAT) for presupposition projection and anaphora resolution are presented and discussed in this article. BAT is reformulated to meet requirements for computational implementation, which include operations on discourse representation structures (renaming and merging), the representation of presuppositions (allowing for sel...

The additive presupposition of particles like too/even is uncontested, but usually stipulated. This paper proposes to derive it based on two properties. (i) too/even is cross-linguistically focus-sensitive, and (ii) in many languages, too/even builds negative polarity items and freechoice items as well, often in concert with other particles. (i) is the source of its existential presupposition, ...

Based on Baunaz (2011), we distinguish among French wh-words and claim that they are three-way ambiguous: they can involve partitivity, specificity (both are presuppositional) and non-presupposition (where nonpresuppositional means not-specific/not-partitive). In addition to semantic differences, specificity and partitivity are argued to involve different prosody with wh-phrases in-situ. Buildi...

In this paper I will give a modal two-dimensional analysis of presupposition and modal subordination. I will think of presupposition as a non-veridical propositional attitude. This allows me to evaluate what is presupposed and what is asserted at different dimensions without getting into the binding problem. What is presupposed will be represented by an accessibility relation between possible w...

This paper attempts to overcome certain objections to the idea that Maximize Presupposition! (Heim 1991) is reducible to the theory of implicature.