RoLinC talk: Fabienne Martin

Talk: Tomorrow ​(19^th March) at 12-1pm (UK time), Fabienne Martin (Utrecht University) will be giving a talk entitled,​The ‘no-agent’ scalar implicature triggered by anticausatives is stronger when the causative alternative is structurally-defined. 

Abstract:

Weak scalar expressions like English It is possible that P (defeasibly) implicate the negation of their stronger alternatives such as It is certain that P (Grice 1967, Horn 1972, Gazdar 1979 a.m.o). When the implicature triggered by the weak scalar item is not satisfied in the context, infelicity may arise (Noveck 2001 a.m.o.). Schäfer and Vivanco (2016) propose that anticausative  expressions such as in (1a) form scales with their (lexical) causative counterparts as in (2) (<break(y), break(x,y)>). Under this view, AC statements should exhibit a similar behavior as other items triggering scalar implicatures: they  should be felt less natural in a context fulfilling the stronger alternative  (e.g., to describe a broken window and a smiling boy  with a slingshot in the hand in front of it), because the AC alternative is too weak in such contexts as it triggers a `no-agent’ scalar implicature (SI), i.e. an inference that there is no agent involved in the event denoted by the AC (see (1a/b)).

(1a) The window broke.

(1b) NOT(Someone broke the window.)

In English,  AC and  causatives, however, are not of equal formal complexity: While ACs involve a vP denoting a set of events endured by the theme argument, causatives have on top of this vP a Voice-projection introducing an external argument variable. English AC therefore do not have  causative counterparts as  structurally-defined alternatives  (Katzir 2007, Katzir and Fox 2011).  More complex structures do not count as alternatives,  unless they are salient in the discourse (i.e. are contextual alternatives).

Languages like French differ from English in that a subset of their ACs receive morphological marking (se  in French), either optional or compulsory, depending on their morphological class. We  report experiments testing the hypothesis that the no-agent scalar implicature triggered by AC-statements  is stronger when the corresponding causative statement is a structurally-defined alternative. Results show that indeed,  French  marked ACs  trigger a stronger no-agent scalar implicature  than unmarked ones (in French or in English).

Link: Please register via the following link: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwodu2orTIiE909PC-3EIm_f2R72Y4QYf2U