Meaning Meeting - Matthew Shi / Where does ignorance come from?
Meaning Meeting - Matthew Shi / Where does ignorance come from?
November 20, Matthew Shi leads the Meaning Meeting with discussion of his work on ignorance inferences with wh-indefinites, abstracted below.
In this presentation, I focus on the puzzling ignorance inference associated with a modal indefinite—Mandarin existential wh-indefinite. Given that the ignorance is associated with wh-indefinites but not all types of indefinites, and there are some cases (e.g., the scope of DE environment and universal quantifiers) where the ignorance is obviated, I suggest that the ignorance inference is akin to knowledge-wise scalar implicature.
On the other hand, since the ignorance once detected is nevertheless obligatory, a purely pragmatic account would be challenging to establish. Consequently, I follow Liu and Yang (2021) and argue that the implicature-like interpretation arises from the grammaticalized exhaustifier Exh (Chierchia, 2013) and belief operator K (e.g., Kratzer & Shimoyama, 2002). However, no life is perfect. This account immediately encounters fatal problems: (i) what to be ignorant about seems to be hard to capture by grammar, and (ii) there must be constraints on the grammar that allow for the presence of Exh and K. Otherwise, for instance, the same mechanism would lead to wrong predictions regarding negative polarity item (NPI) licensing (Zeijlstra, p.c.). I explore the consequences of postulating Exh and K in the grammar and lay out my attempt to salvage this account: I suggest that those operators are only required by the syntax to form agreement relations with the wh-indefinite. I don’t know whether this will work out, but it does make it less painful.