Affiliation:
1. The Ohio State University Department of Linguistics, , Columbus, Ohio, USA
Abstract
Abstract
Implicative verbs (e.g., manage, dare) are characterized by complement inferences (Karttunen, 1971). English manage entails its complement; the entailment reverses polarity with matrix negation, and is accompanied by a projective inference to the complement’s non-triviality (Coleman, 1975; Karttunen & Peters, 1979). I use data from Finnish and English to argue that the implicative inferential profile is derived from backgrounded relations of causal necessity and causal sufficiency (defined over the structure of a formal causal model; Pearl 2000; Schulz 2011) which link the lexical content of an implicative verb to the realization of its complement. The proposal builds on Baglini & Francez’s (2016) causal analysis of manage, but significantly revises the earlier proposal to offer a treatment which accounts not only for English manage, but extends to the lexical semantics of the full implicative class, including ‘polarity-reversing’ verbs like fail, lexically specific verbs like dare, and their Finnish counterparts. Unlike earlier analyses, the proposed causal semantics also provides a natural explanation of the commonalities between two-way entailing verbs like manage and a related class of weaker ‘one-way’ implicatives such as Finnish jaksaa (‘have the strength’), which entail complement truth values under only one matrix polarity, but generate strong pragmatic implicatures in the two-way implicative pattern under the non-entailing polarity.
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Subject
Artificial Intelligence,Linguistics and Language,Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
Reference71 articles.
1. Direct causation: a new approach to an old question;Baglini,2020
2. The implications of managing;Baglini;Journal of Semantics,2016
3. Causal selection: the linguistic take;Bassel,2020
4. Scalar implicature as a grammatical phenomenon;Chierchia,2012