Abstract
Von Heusinger (2007) shows that the definite article’s uniqueness presupposition causes problems in a standard account of focus alternatives. He solves this problem by proposing a new lexical entry for the definite article, a solution adopted by Riester and Kamp (2010). This paper shows that the observed behavior is not limited to the definite article, making such a solution undesirable. Our argument is based on two observations: (1) The definite article is a soft presupposition trigger with respect to uniqueness and (2) soft presupposition triggers have a special behavior in focus alternatives.
I thank Maribel Romero, two anonymous reviewers, the participants of the Amsterdam Colloquium 2011 and the Research Colloquium in Konstanz for comments.
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Walker, A. (2012). Focus, Uniqueness and Soft Presupposition Triggers. In: Aloni, M., Kimmelman, V., Roelofsen, F., Sassoon, G.W., Schulz, K., Westera, M. (eds) Logic, Language and Meaning. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7218. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31482-7_47
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31482-7_47
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