Supplements Within a Unidimensional Semantics

Abstract

Potts (2005, 2007) claims that Grice’s ‘conventional implicatures’ offer a powerful argument in favor of a multidimensional semantics, one in which certain expressions fail to interact scopally with various operators because their meaning is located in a separate dimension. Potts discusses in detail two classes of phenomena: ‘expressives’ (e.g. honorifics, ethnic slurs, etc.), and ‘supplements’, especially Non-Restrictive Relative Clauses (= NRRs). But the former have been re-analyzed in presuppositional terms by several researchers, who have suggested that expressives trigger presuppositions that are i. indexical and ii. concern the speaker’s attitudes - hence the fact that i. they appear to have matrix scope, and ii. they are automatically accommodated (Sauerland 2007, Schlenker 2007). Thus supplements arguably remain the best argument in favor of a separate dimension for conventional implicatures. We explore an alternative in which (1) NRRs can be syntactically attached with matrix scope, despite their appearance in embedded positions; (2) NRRs can in some cases be syntactically attached within the scope of other operators, in which case they semantically interact with them; (3) NRRs are semantically conjoined with the rest of the sentence, but (4) they are subject to a pragmatic rule that requires that their content be relatively easy to accommodate – hence some non-trivial projection facts when NRRs do not have matrix scope. (1), which is in full agreement with the ‘high attachment’ analysis of NRRs (e.g. Ross 1967, Emonds 1979, McCawley 1998, Del Gobbo 2003), shows that Potts’s semantic machinery is redundant: its effects follow from more conservative semantic assumptions once an adequate syntax is postulated. (2), which disagrees with most accounts of NRRs, shows that Potts’s machinery makes incorrect predictions when NRRs have a non-matrix attachment. (4) explains why NRRs sometimes display a projection behavior similar to presuppositions.