Causal necessity and sufficiency in implicativity
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v26i0.3863Abstract
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.Downloads
Published
2016-12-14
Issue
Section
Articles
License
Articles appearing in SALT are published under an author agreement with the Linguistic Society of America and are made available to readers under a Creative Commons Attribution License.