Recent defences of the existential approach

The existential approach to additivity has recently been defended against anaphoric approaches by Kapitonov (2012) and Ruys (2015). In what follows, I will present the main ideas of these anal-yses.

The analysis of Kapitonov (2012) is based on the idea that the existential presupposition that additives bring with them requires the presence of some discourse referent – ormental repre-sentation, a term covers representations of any entities that discourse participants might have in mind – to which the predication of the host sentence of the additive applies. Kapitonov imple-ments the semantic part of the proposal in dynamic predicate logic (Groenendijk and Stokhof, 1991), and argues that additive meaning should be analysed as a Stalnakerian pragmatic presup-position (Stalnaker, 1999). Without going into the formal details of the analysis, for Kapitonov, the presence of an additive essentially leads to the appearance of an existentially bound variable y in the semantics. In other words, the proposition that the speaker presupposes is an existen-tial statement. The hearer, upon hearing an utterance that contains an additive, accommodates the existential statement without any trouble. However, if the hearer is not able to resolve the identity of the variabley introduced in the presupposition (i.e. to couple it with an appropriate mental representation), the utterance containing the additive will be perceived as infelicitous.

The reasoning that Kapitonov attributes to the hearer is that if the speaker uses an additive, they are ‘making a parallel reference’ to some mental representation, and probably for good reason (i.e. the information is relevant). Thus, the hearer must try to uncover what the parallel reference targets. If this search fails, the utterance is pragmatically odd.

The main advantage of Kapitonov’s approach is that establishing the identity ofy, i.e. link-ing it with a referent, may reach further than beyond classical discourse referents, and that the anaphoric feeling of additivity is explained without the involvement of actual anaphora. The first point is especially important because Kapitonov shows that additives may, at least marginally, be felicitous in the presence of world-knowledge referents for the variable (contraKripke, 1990/2009).

In (114), for example, the associate isI, and the relevant mental representation for the variable is

3.2. Existential approaches

people in the Netherlands. Crucially, as the follow-up sentence shows,people in the Netherlands is not available for anaphora after thetoo-sentence. This is unproblematic for Kapitonov’s anal-ysis, where pronominal anaphora has no role in the semantics of additivity (cf. the anaphoric approaches to be presented in section 3.3).

(114) Shared world knowledge antecedent (Kapitonov, 2012, p. 71) [Context: Ann and Jack share a stereotype that people in the Netherlands ice skate a lot, and they both know they share it. Jack tells Ann:]

I’m going to the Netherlands this Christmas. I’ll be ice skating, too! *I can’t wait to meet them!

Kapitonov argues that the saliency and context-relevance of the mental representation that is identified with the variable introduced by the additive plays an important role in determining the degree of acceptability or felicity associated with additives: the more salient a mental repre-sentation, the easier it is to resolve the variable to it. Although Kapitonov’s entry oftooand the examples discussed in the paper only involve mental representations that range over individuals, the approach can in principle be extended to cover other types of mental representations, e.g.

propositions. (This is indeed what will be proposed in the analytical part of this dissertation.) Another recent defence of the existential approach against the anaphoric approach appears in Ruys 2015. Ruys proposes that the presupposition oftoois as in (115) (cf. Karttunen and Kart-tunen, 1976; Karttunen and Peters, 1979; Heim, 1990, 1992). In (115),αstands for the F-marked associate oftoo, andφfor the scope predicate. (Like Kapitonov, Ruys does not discusseither.) (115) Presupposition oftoo(Ruys, 2015, p. 358, fn. 23)

φ[αF]too presupposes ∃x[x6=α∧φ(x)]

Ruys’s main argument for the existential approach and against the need for an anaphoric ap-proach is based on the observation that in sentences with additives, the associate of the addi-tive is F-marked, while the rest is discourse-old and de-accented, i.e.Given, and must therefore have an antecedentA. Ruys makes use of the definition of givenness proposed by Schwarzschild (1999):

(116) Givenness (after Schwarzschild 1999) (Ruys, 2015, p. 351) (i) A constituentC that is not F-marked must be Given

(ii) A constituentC is given iff it has an antecedentAthat entails it after replacing all F-marked constituents inC with variables, raising bothC andAto typet by filling any open argument positions with variables, and applying existential closure (iii) Exception: Referential expressions are Given iff they have coreferential antecedents

In Kripke’s (1990/2009) classic exampleJohn is having dinner in New York tonight, too, the focus isJohn, and the scopeis having dinner in New York tonightis not F-marked; by (116), the scope is Given, and its existential closure comes out as∃x[is-having-dinner-in-New-York-tonight(x)]. By (116), this statement must have an antecedentAthat entails it. In an empty context, this is not the case, and the dinner example is therefore predicted to be infelicitous, just as it is on anaphoric ap-proaches. In other words, Ruys argues that once independent properties of focus and Givenness are taken into account, existential analyses of additivity also predict Kripke’s example to be infe-licitous, and therefore, this example does not adjudicate between the two types of approaches.

To show that an existential approach that makes reference to Givenness is superior to anaphoric approaches, Ruys proposes to manipulate the F-marking of the host sentence so that Givenness is not violated. In (117), which is apparently felicitous in the absence of any mention of anything else passing (i.e. there is no salient antecedent that an anaphor could pick up), the associate of toois F-marked (the associate is coindexed with the additive, as in Ruys’s examples), but so is the verb. Ruys argues that the extra F-marking on the verb alleviates the Givenness-violation that would otherwise ensue, and renders the example felicitous.

(117) Manipulation of F-marking to avoid Givenness violation (Ruys, 2015, p. 356) Thisⁱ, tooⁱ, shall pass

Ruys proposes that with additivity, there are two existential presuppositions at play: one is due to Givenness, and one to the additive itself. The latter presupposition, Ruys argues, does not involve any anaphoric link between the host sentence and an antecedent. In addition to (117), Ruys provides other examples that seem felicitous in the absence of a linguistic (or non-linguistic) antecedent for an anaphor, and that are therefore hard to explain for an anaphoric account. In (118), for example, as long as the existential presuppositions generated by Givenness and the additive are entailed in the context, the results are felicitous.

(118) Felicity oftooin the absence of overt antecedent (Ruys, 2015, p. 359) a. Guard: I’m sorry, small children are not allowed to enter the garden.

Child: That’s not fair! I deserve the right to enter the garden, too.

b. Dean of students: Do PhD students even have families to take care of?

Student representative: Yes, PhD students have families, too

In sum, Ruys argues that the infelicity of additives in out-of-the-blue contexts may be explained without resorting to an anaphoric treatment of additivity. Both Kapitonov (2012) and Ruys (2015) underline the observation that if additivity did involve covert pronominal anaphora, the unavail-ability of the antecedents for overt pronominal anaphora would be unexpected. The solutions that the two authors provide for this problem are different, however. Kapitonov proposes an anal-ysis of additives where the additive presupposition is existential, but the felicitous use of an addi-tive also requires that the pragmatic component be able to determine the identity of the mental

3.2. Existential approaches

representation corresponding to a variable introduced by the additive. Kapitonov’s approach will be brought up again in section 3.3.1, where I discuss anaphoric approaches to additivity. Note that although I do not adopt the formalism proposed by Kapitonov and formulate the presuppo-sition differently (for example, it will not involve first-order quantification over individuals), the proposal presented in this dissertation will stand very close to it.

In a different vein, Ruys proposes that some properties associated with additives should sim-ply be derived from the semantics of focus and Givenness (cf. Geurts and van der Sandt, 2004), and that the infelicity of the Kripke-example that is used to argue for an anaphoric approach is in fact due to a violation of Givenness. For Ruys, the fact that non-linguistic but contextually en-tailed propositions may license additives follows from the purely existential view of the additive presupposition.