Obligatory implicatures and grammaticality

Abstract

The paper explores some puzzling data on agreement with disjunctive noun phrases in Russian. I show that the data can be nicely explained by the theory of implicatures. The proposed analysis raises a more general question, namely whether scalar implicatures of a sentence can ever lead to ungrammaticality. In many theories of scalar implicatures it is predicted to be impossible. I argue that the answer is yes, but that happens in a limited number of cases, namely when a scalar implicature of a given sentence has to be calculated but potentially leads to a contradiction if conjoined with another scalar implicature of the sentence, importantly the one which cannot be disregarded due to relevance.