Topic/Comment, Presupposition, Logical Form and Focus Stress Implicatures: The Case of Focal Particles only and also  

Oleh:

Atlas, Jay David

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Semantics (Sebagian Full Text) vol. 8 no. 1-2 (Dec. 1991), page 127-147.
Topik: Presupposition; Logical Form; Focus Stress Implicatures; Focal Particles
Fulltext: vol 8, no 1, p 127-147.pdf (987.73KB)

Isi artikel

In Chapter 12 of the thirteenth-century Oxford logician William of Sherwood's Treatise on Syncategprematic Words (Syncategoremata), Sherwood discusses the word only (tantum), which in the example Only Socrates is running indicates, according to Sherwood, 'how much of the subject is under the predicate—viz. that the subject Socrates and no more is under it. In that case it is an exclusive word' (Sherwood 1968: 81). In Chapter 7 of the twentieth-century English logician Peter Geach's (1962/1980) Reference and Generality, Geach discusses the words only and alone, remarking that medieval logicians *were greatly interested in exclusive propositions, but their treatment of them was on the whole superficial. This comes out in their having generally accepted the idea that exclusive propositions were exponible as conjunctions— "Socrates alone is wise", say, as "Socrates is wise and nobody besides (other than) Socrates is wise" . . . If the force of the exclusive proposition is to exclude everything other than what is named in or by the subject-term from "sharing in the predicate", that is no reason for reading in an implication that something named by the subject-term does "share in the predicate"' (Geach 1962/1980: 208-9). This dispute between English logicians across seven centuries has been echoed in recent and influential work by the Anglo-American philosopher H. Paul Grice and by linguists, notably Laurence Horn in his (1969) 'A Presuppositional Analysis of ONLY and EVEN', in his (1989) treatise A Natural History of Negation, Lauri Karttunen and Stanley Peters in their (1979) 'Conventional Implicature', and Josef Taglicht in his (1984) book Message and Emphasis: On Focus and Scope in English. In this paper I shall argue that neither Sherwood, with his conjunction analysis of Only x is F, nor Geach, with his non-conjunctive analysis, nor Horn, with his presuppositional analysis, nor Taglicht, with his conjunction analysis of only and his conventional implicature analysis of also and even, have accounted for the semantic and pragmatic facts, for their analyses have failed to integrate linguistic facts about topic and focus, about entailments, and about Gricean (197S, 1989) 'implicatures'. By reconsidering their views I hope to show how a more coherent account can be achieved. In the course of this paper I will offer my own analysis, building on what I have learned from theirs and, I hope, improving on them.

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