Rhetorically-based scalar-additivity: The view from Italian addirittura

Abstract

Even-like particles have widely been analyzed as inducing scalar and
additive presuppositions (cf. Horn 1969; Karttunen & Peters 1979; Rooth 1992; Gast
& van der Auwera 2011). However, the additivity of even has been controversial
since at least Rullmann 1997 and increasingly called into question (see Greenberg
& Umbach 2021 for references); Greenberg specifically argues that scalar even-like
particles can vary in additivity. This claim is surprising in light of the typological
study in Gast & van der Auwera 2011, which subsumes even and similar expressions
under a larger class of additive particles. Against this background, we present an
analysis of Italian addirittura, which with perfino has been described as scalaradditive
(Visconti 2005) – but only optionally so – and is chosen preferentially over
perfino precisely in those contexts that Greenberg takes to challenge the additivity of
even. We argue, drawing on observations in Atayan 2017, that addirittura contrasts
with perfino in deriving its scalar alternatives from rhetorical structure rather than
focus structure. Once this is recognized we can view addirittura as additive, after
all, in a rhetorical sense we describe below.