Project Details
Projekt
Exhaustiveness in It-Clefts
Subject Area
General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
Term
from 2014 to 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 254945573
Whether and in what sense it-clefts are exhaustive is one of the longstanding debates in the theoretical literature on the semantics-pragmatics interface. While in the theoretical literature an overwhelming majority of the recent papers advocate semantic analyses of exhaustiveness (e.g. Velleman et al 2012, Büring and Kriz 2013), recently appeared experimental studies (Onea and Beaver 2009, Drenhaus et. al 2011, Washburn et al. 2013) tend support the pragmatic position advocated in Horn (1981). On close investigation the experimental studies do not appear entirely conclusive, however, not only because they do not take into account differences regarding at-issueness or not-at-issueness (Tonhauser et al. 2013) of the exhaustiveness inference, but also because existing experimental studies have not yet been systematic. In this project we intend to close the gap between experimental evidence and theoretical literature by proposing and conducting a series of systematic experimental studies which shed light onto the question whether clefts are semantically or pragmatically exhaustive. Moreover, our proposed experiments are also able to detect and distinguish subtle predictions of competing theories of exhaustification of clefts, such as manner-based implicatures, maximality vs. conditional presuppositions or at-issueness vs. not-at-issueness. In particular, such predictions are connected to contextual effects of salience and unexpectedness and to specific cross-linguistic differences.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
