Causal necessity and sufficiency in implicativity

Prerna Nadathur

Abstract


Karttunen's (1971) implicative verbs are notable for generating inferences over their complements. English "manage to X", for instance, entails the truth of X: the entailment reverses with matrix negation and seems tied to the elusive presuppositional contribution of the implicative predicate (Coleman 1975).  Building on Baglini & Francez (2015), and drawing on insights provided by implicative data from Finnish, I propose an account of the implicative class which links the lexical presuppositional content of an implicative verb to inferences over the truth-value of its complement via a model of causal necessity and sufficiency between contextually-salient variables (Schulz 2011).  The proposal also provides a natural explanation for the commonalities between "manage" and weaker one-way implicatives like Finnish "jaksaa"(=have.strength), which only entail under one matrix polarity.


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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/salt.v26i0.3863

Copyright (c) 2016 Prerna Nadathur