Scalarity, Information Structure and Relevance in varieties of Hurford Conditionals

Abstract

Hurford Conditionals (HCs) involving scalemates appear felicitous, despite the fact that exh is not predicted to rescue such structures from Super Redundancy, a principle introduced in Kalomoiros (2024) to capture HCs without scalemates. We thus propose an alternative to Super Redundancy based on two main ideas: (1) expressions evoke QuDs locally, and when they combine via logical operators so do their respective QuDs; (2) a local QuD Q that gets incrementally combined with an existing QuD Q′ should have its maximal true answers “fit” the information structure already introduced by Q′. This predicts that the consequent of a conditional has to evoke a question that properly refines some question evoked by the antecedent. The pattern is then captured with the additional assumption that scalar items can evoke fine-grained enough questions (generated by their scalemates) out-of-the-blue, while non-scalar items with different granularities cannot.