Explaining the Exceptive-Additive Ambiguity in Mandarin

Abstract

As in many languages, the exceptive marker chule in Mandarin is ambiguous between ‘except’ and ‘in addition to’. The paper shows that the exceptive inference is an implicature while the additive one a presupposition. A unified analysis is sketched: chule encodes just subtraction; it removes something from a Roberts-style QUD [30]. Exceptive chule corresponds to removing an individual from the domain of the wh of the QUD, while additive chule removes a proposition. In the first case, reasoning about alternatives leads to the implicature [10, 16]. In the latter case, subtraction from a QUD is employed since the subtracted proposition is already known to be true, and not under discussion.