On December 17th, he presented joint work with Benjamin Spector on “Presupposed ignorance and exhaustification: or how scalar implicatures and presuppositions interact”.
Abstract:
We investigate interactions between scalar inferences and presuppositions. There are two major observations to be accounted for: (i) Scalar items in Strawson decreasing environments give rise to scalar inferences only in the presupposition, as observed previously by Gajewski & Sharvit (2011); (ii) Scalar items that generate ignorance inferences give rise to what we call presupposed ignorance inferences in presuppositional contexts. To give a uniform account of these observations, we postulate the “Presupposed Ignorance Principle”. However, this alone makes wrong predictions for non-Strawson decreasing environments. In order to circumvent this problem, we postulate a scalar strengthening mechanism responsible for scalar implicatures, which crucially is a presupposition hole (just like ‘only’).
