Chierchia’s conjecture and the logicality of natural languages
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5007/1984-8412.2020v17nespp4701Abstract
This paper presents Chierchia (2013)’s conjecture, according to which the distribution and interpretation of scalar items, free choice, polarity item and implicatures are conditioned by the logical context in which they occur. In downward entailment contexts, the exaustification of the alternatives does not generate a grammatical contradiction, whereas in upwards contexts, exaustifying the alternatives leads to a grammatical contradiction. We show that the conjecture rightly predicts intuitive judgments of those items in Brazilian Portuguese and explains the experimental results found by Pires (2018) on the behavior of modals in Brazilian Portuguese.
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