Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The additive presupposition of particles like too/even is uncontested, but usually stipulated. This paper proposes to derive it based on two properties. (i) too/even is cross-linguistically focus-sensitive, and (ii) in many languages, too/even builds negative polarity items and free-choice items as well, often in concert with other particles. (i) is the source of its existential presupposition, and (ii) offers clues regarding how additivity comes about. (i)-(ii) together demand a sparse semantics for too/even, one that can work with different kinds of alternatives (focus, subdomain, scalar) and invoke suitably different further operators.
DOI: 10.53437/5fme3x41
Author: Anna Szabolcsi
Institution: New York University
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W2773976366