A new case of pragmatically deviant embedded disjunctions
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v28i0.4432Abstract
In this paper, we discuss a novel observation that sentences such as #Each of these three girls is Mary, Susan, or Jane are deviant. Its deviance is surprising: the sentence should convey that one of the three girls is Mary, another one of them is Susan, and yet another one is Jane; however, it cannot be naturally used to do so. We will propose that the deviance is caused by ignorance inferences which contradict common knowledge. If the proposal is on the right track, ignorance inferences need to be derived blindly to common knowledge, similarly to what has been proposed for scalar implicatures by Magri (2009).
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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.