Abstract
German has a family of expressions corresponding to the English scalar additive particle even, featuring the negative polarity items einmal and auch nur in addition to affirmative sogar. This study reports novel findings on the meanings of einmal and auch nur which are unexpected under existing analyses of English even. First, the particles einmal and auch nur are shown to differ from sogar in that they consistently contribute information about the truth values of alternative propositions, as opposed to their mere likelihood. Second, it is shown that the implications in question do not have the compositional behavior of presuppositions and instead call for the assumption that einmal and auch nur quantify existentially over alternative propositions at the level of truth conditions.
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I would like to thank Rajesh Bhatt, Junko Shimoyama, and two anonymous reviewers, whose detailed and insightful comments have helped me to improve the quality of this paper. At various stages, I have also benefited from comments by Kai von Fintel, Danny Fox, Elena Guerzoni, Irene Heim, Hans Kamp, and Carlota Smith. Thanks also to audiences at Sinn und Bedeutung in October 2002 in Konstanz and the Milan workshop on polarity phenomena in June 2003. Of course, all remaining mistakes are my own. The preliminary stages of this research were supported by a postdoctoral fellowship in the program Sprachliche Repräsentationen und ihre Interpretation at the University of Stuttgart, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
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Schwarz, B. Scalar Additive Particles in Negative Contexts. Nat Lang Seman 13, 125–168 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-004-2441-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-004-2441-0