Causal necessity and sufficiency in implicativity

Authors

  • Prerna Nadathur Stanford University Department of Linguistics

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v26i0.3863

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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Published

2016-12-14

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Articles