dual as a core concept and the pronounceability of alternatives

Abstract

Chemla (2007) observed that the French universal quantifier tous (‘all’) is anti-dual, even though French has no word for ‘both’ to feed a Maximize Presupposition competition.1 This has become one of the better-known examples suggesting the need for ‘conceptual alternatives’ (Buccola, Križ, and Chemla 2018), but no detailed account of it has been put forth. Furthermore, we show that a naive implementation of the idea overgenerates anti-duality inferences in other quantifiers, such as each, which and one in English and French. This paper proposes an account of Chemla’s (2007) puzzle where French tous has a dual universal alternative built from a dual core concept. That alternative is blocked from being realized due to a principle that we call Avoid Ambiguity. In addition to accounting for tous’s anti-duality, this proposal accounts for the lack of anti-duality in other quantifiers.