Scalar Implicature, Hurford's Constraint, Contrastiveness and How They All Come Together

Abstract

Disjunction with two scalar items, such as some or all of the books, has been regarded as evidence for the grammatical theory of scalar implicatures (e.g., Chierchia et al., 2012). Hurford's Constraint (Hurford, 1974) provides that disjuncts are banned from having an entailing relation, and to make such a disjunction comply with Hurford's Constraint, the meaning of some must be locally strengthened. Interestingly, however, the order of disjoined scalar items is not free, as noted by Singh (2008). The order in which a weaker scalar item comes first followed by its stronger scalar mate is better than the other order. I present an analysis of this ordering restriction based on the novel observation that the restriction is not only found in disjunction but in contrastive environments in general. I propose that contrasting a linguistic expression requires a “contrast antecedent,” which must elicit a set of mutually exclusive alternatives that includes the meaning of the contrasted expression. It will be demonstrated how the mutual exclusivity requirement presents a principled explanation for the ordering asymmetry as well as Hurford's Constraint itself, which indicates that the root of the constraint is not in disjunction but in contrastiveness. One of the indispensable ingredients in the proposal is the grammatical/conventional generation of scalar implicatures, as the strengthened meaning must be the basis of alternatives. The paper also provides a speculative analysis of only, in which I suggest that the process of exhaustification in the grammatical theory of scalar implicatures should not be characterized as the implicit only, the semantic contributions of which are more different than commonly assumed.