XPrag.de member Joseph P. DeVeaugh-Geiss from project “ExCl” at Potsdam University will give a talk at the University of Konstanz on Thursday, April 14th at 1.30pm in room M901. His talk is entitled “That’s not quite it: An experimental investigation of (non-)exhaustivity in it-clefts”.
Abstract: We present an empirical study on the source and status of exhaustivity inferences in it-clefts compared to definite descriptions (pseudoclefts with an identity statement), exclusives, and focus constructions in German. Our study uses a novel mouse-driven picture-verification task in which the incremental updating of the context allows one to determine at which point participants take exhaustivity into consideration. This method allows us to address systematically the following research questions: Is cleft exhaustivity at-issue or not-at-issue? Is it semantic or pragmatic? Our results are compatible with a parallel analysis of clefts and definite descriptions (see Percus 1997, Büring & Kriz 2013; cf. Deveaugh-Geiss et al. 2015), albeit one in which exhaustivity is a not-at-issue pragmatic inference in both constructions (Heim 1982, Ludlow & Segal 2004 for definites; Horn 1981, 2014 for clefts). In particular, we claim that clefts and definite descriptions (specifically the compound definite ‘derjenige’) only encode an anaphoric existence presupposition and uniqueness is derived from Gricean reasoning: in German both sentence types are unambiguously marked as either singular or plural (cf. English), and by choosing singular the speaker implicates uniqueness. Crucially, our pragmatic account does not rely on the exclusion of focus alternatives.