Abstract
This paper is about even in downward entailing contexts. Karttunen and Peters (1979) have shown that there are two different sets of implicatures of even in such contexts. They argue that the two sets of implicatures are derived by allowing even to take scope either higher or lower than a negative polarity licenser. Rooth (1985) argues that even is lexically ambiguous, that is, there is a negative polarity even. I argue against Rooth's ambiguity theory and show that within Rooth's theory of focus, a scope theory of even has better empirical coverage. I also answer objections to the scope theory raised by Rooth (1985) and Karttunen and Karttunen (1977).
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I would like to thank Roger Schwarzschild, Irene Heim, Anita Mittwoch, Barbara Partee, Paul Portner, Barry Schein, and Nomi Shir for discussion. Special thanks to Dorit Abusch for comments on the manuscript and to Rhonna Buchalla for discussion of German. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Israeli Association for Theoretical Linguists annual meeting, June 1992, and the workshop on discourse, February 1993; the SALT III conference, March 1993, in Irvine, California; Mats Rooth's workshop on Focus during the Fifth European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information, August 1993; the conference on Recent Developments in the Theory of Natural Language Semantics in Blaubeuren, Germany, October 1994; and the UMass colloquium series, November 18, 1994. Some of the work appears in the proceedings of SALT III, edited by U. Lahiri and A. Wyner, in the Cornell Working Papers. This research was partially funded by U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation grant #90-267, “Focus and Argument Structure” (principal investigators: Jane Grimshaw and Nomi Shir).
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Wilkinson, K. The scope of even . Nat Lang Seman 4, 193–215 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00372819
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00372819