Implicative inferences and causality in enough and too constructions

Abstract

This paper proposes a new account of the aspect-dependent implicative behavior of enough and too constructions (E&T). Against Hacquard (2005)’s claim that E&T are inherently complement-entailing, I propose that they simply attribute a capacity to their subjects, but do not force complement entailment. Actualization under perfective is driven by ‘actualistic’ aspectual coercion (Homer, 2011), which applies only to a specific set of stative predicates. This aligns perfective E&T with recent treatments of implicatives (Baglini &Francez, 2016; Nadathur, 2016), and opens up a new approach to the longstanding puzzle of actuality entailments on ability modals (Bhatt, 1999).