Meaning Meeting - Will Zumchak / Equivalency oddness, questions and presuppositions
Meaning Meeting - Will Zumchak / Equivalency oddness, questions and presuppositions
Tuesday November 18 at 12:30, the Meaning Meeting has Will Zumchak, presenting his work on exactly why it is odd to say "Some Italians come from a Mediterranean country," given that they all do.
Equivalency Oddness, Questions, and Presuppositions
Magri (2009) observes that when two scalar alternatives are equally informative in context, the logically weaker of the two sounds odd. For example, given that all Italians come from Italy, asserting “some Italians come from a warm country” sounds odd, while asserting its equally informative alternative, “(all) Italians come from a warm country,” does not. In contrast with existing “blind-exh” approaches (Magri, 2011, 2017; Del Pinal, 2021; Bar-Lev, 2024), I argue that this “Equivalency Oddness” (EO) is best described using purely pragmatic processes: EO arises when an assertion fails to directly address a (sometimes implicit) question under discussion that has been pruned to remove certain answers. I demonstrate that, in addition to the basic cases, this approach explains data involving explicit questions that the blind-exh approach cannot straightforwardly capture. Finally, I discuss cases of “embedded EO”
reported in Magri (2011) and Sudo (2025). While these cases at first appear to challenge a fully pragmatic account, I argue that these are better thought of as violations of a version of Maximize Presupposition! rather than Equivalency Oddness per se.