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EXCEPTION IS DENIAL OF EXPECTATION
Ivan Garcia-Alvarez
Stanford University
Thursday, January 13, 12PM MJH Rm 126
Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center/Mellon Foundation
Graduate Research Program
Since the influential analyses of Hoeksema (1987), von Fintel (1993),
and Moltmann (1995), it is standardly assumed that exception phrases can only
be applied felicitously to NPs headed by universal determiners. More
recently, however, it has been noticed that whereas sentences involving
the determiner 'some' or a small cardinality numeral in combination with
an exception phrase are typically ill-formed, sentences containing the
determiners 'most', 'many' and 'few' as associates of the exception phrase
are often acceptable in English (Garcia Alvarez 2003). The following
example shows an exception phrases used with 'most':
(1) You sense what attracted the neurasthenic Millay to Boissevain when
you read Max Eastman's description of him as "handsome and muscular and
bold, boisterous in conversation, noisy in laughter, yet redeemed by a
strain of something feminine that most men except creative geniuses lack."
(The New York Times, 09/16/01, p. 12)
I will show that exception phrases are licensed when a certain
expectation is denied. If a sentence of the form 'DET N VP' would have led to an
expectation about a subset S of the N denotation, then this expectation
can be denied by using an exception sentence 'DET N except S VP'.
Generalizations (and the expectations they give rise to) are often
connected to the existence of certain majorities. For example, the
generalization behind the claim 'Most politicians are corrupt' is rooted
in the perceived existence of a majority of corrupt politicians. Imagine
we are introduced to Jones, a typical Washington politician. Based simply
on the existence of such a majority, we are more likely to conclude that
Jones is corrupt than to infer the contrary. But imagine that, as a matter
of fact, Jones is an honest public servant. In due recognition of this
fact, the sentence above may be qualified with an exception phrase to
produce 'Most politicians except Jones are corrupt'. Quantificational
statements that characterize majorities will typically accept exception
phrases. In the talk I provide a general definition of such statements,
which most obviously comprise those claims made by universal quantifiers,
but also by properly proportional quantifiers with a large proportion (or
a small proportion in the case of negative Qs).
The account I propose in this talk suggests that exception markers have
a
meaning related to that of adversative coordinators (Lakoff 1971,
Blakemore 2002), thus acknowledging the observation that exception markers
across languages often have independent adversative uses (Mourin 1980). In
addition, it offers a way of providing a unified account of those
predicates that accept exceptive modification and yet do not contain overt
quantification.
References
Blakemore, D.: 2002, 'Relevance and Linguistic Meaning'. Cambridge: CUP
Press.
von Fintel, K.: 1993, 'Exceptive constructions', Natural
Language Semantics 1, 123-48.
Garcia Alvarez, I.: 2003, 'Quantifiers in
exceptive NPs', Proceedings of WCCFL 22, 207-216.
Hoeksema, J.: 1987, 'The logic of exception', Proceedings of ESCOL 4, 100-113.
Lakoff, R.: 1971, 'If's, and's and but's about conjunction'. In Fillmore,
C.J. et al. (eds), Studies in Linguistic Semantics, NewYork: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 114-149.
Moltmann, F.: 1995, 'Exception sentences and polyadic quantification', L&P
18, 223-280.
Mourin, L.: 1980, 'L'exception et la restriction dans les langues
Romanes', Travaux de Linguistique et de Litterature 18, 173-195.
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