Against class A treatment of no more : experimental evidence from Czech

DOČEKAL, Mojmír. Against class A treatment of no more : experimental evidence from Czech. In Degree Expressions and Polarity Effects (DegPol2020), 9.-10.3.2020, Berlín. 2020.

Basic information

• Original name: Against class A treatment of no more : experimental evidence from Czech
• Authors: DOČEKAL, Mojmír.
• Edition: Degree Expressions and Polarity Effects (DegPol2020), 9.-10.3.2020, Berlín, 2020.

Other information

• Original language: English
• Type of outcome: Presentations at conferences
• Field of Study: 60200 6.2 Languages and Literature
• Country of publisher: Germany
• Confidentiality degree: is not subject to a state or trade secret
• WWW: URL
• Organization unit: Faculty of Arts
• Keywords in English: modified numerals; experiments
• Tags: International impact, Reviewed

Abstract

Background. Previous research on modified numerals established some widely accepted contrasts between comparative modifiers (CM) and superlative modifiers (SM) (see Büring 2008; Geurts and Nouwen 2007; Nouwen 2015; Mayr 2013; Schwarz 2016 a.o.), such as: (i) CM don’t but SM do giveraise to obligatory ignorance implicatures; (ii) CM can scope over or under existential modals (EM)but SM have to outscope them. Ano more than Numconstruction (NMC), where negation and comparison are combined in a way exemplified by an English sentence (1) from Nouwen (2008), to this day the most developed formal treatment of NMC, is then claimed to allow both scopes w.r.t.EM (Nouwen 2008) and to have scalar bounding inference, signalling speaker’s well-informedness (ibid), since English no more construction (unlike class B modifiers) give raise to equality readings like (=50) for (1). Such claims seem to be supported by the comparative morphology of NMC. I bring new experimental and corpus evidence against both claims, showing that (cross-linguistically) (i)NMC can be interpreted only with wider scope then EM; (ii) NMC is compatible (mostly) only with speaker’s insecurity (or so-called variation) readings as SM. The experimental and corpus evidence comes from Czech as it was observed before that Slavic languages (unlike English) generally don’t support speaker’s well-informedness NMC interpretation (Dočekal 2017).

Links

• MUNI/A/0873/2019, interní kód MU: Name: Podpora výzkumu studentů na MU - obecná jazykovědy a baltistika 2020

Investor: Masaryk University, Category A