@incollection{Chemla:2008AM, abstract = {

Adverbial modification gives rise to inferences which pattern very much like presuppositions. In particular, these inferences persist when the original sentence —e.g., (i)— is embedded in various downward entailing environments —e.g., negation in (ii), the scope of the quantifiers `none` and `less than 3` in (iii) and (iv):

  1. John arrived late.
    implies that: John came.
  2. John didn`t arrive late.
    also implies that: John came.
  3. None of these 10 students arrived late.
    implies that: all of the 10 students involved came.
  4. Less than 3 of these 10 students arrived late.
    implies that: all of the 10 students involved came.

In this paper, adverbial modification is compared to presuppositions and to (indirect) scalar implicatures which also show intriguing similarities with presuppositions. The present experiment reveals differences between implicatures and presuppositions, both in terms of their projection properties and the underlying derivation processes (reaction times). However, in this very same experiment, adverbial modification cannot be distinguished from any of the other two phenomena.

These results paradoxically argue against a strong distinction between presuppositions and scalar implicatures. They support recent proposals which account for presuppositions in terms of implicatures (Simons 2001, Schlenker 2008, Chemla 2009) which would allow adverbial modification to fall in the middle of this hierarchial spectrum of linguistic inferences.

}, author = {Emmanuel Chemla}, booktitle = {Semantics and Pragmatics: From Experiment to Theory}, date-added = {2008-07-10 15:38:12 +0200}, date-modified = {2017-02-23 23:26:25 +0000}, editor = {Uli Sauerland and Kazuko Yatsushiro}, pages = {249--263}, publisher = {Palgrave Macmillan New York}, title = {An experimental approach to adverbial modification}, url = {http://www.emmanuel.chemla.free.fr/Material/Chemla-AdvModif-Xprag.pdf}, year = {2009}, bdsk-url-1 = {http://www.emmanuel.chemla.free.fr/Material/Chemla-AdvModif-Xprag.pdf}}