Paula Menéndez-Benito

Two Views on Epistemic Indefinites

Epistemic indefinites are existential determiners that convey ignorance on the part of the speaker. This paper reviews two types of accounts of the semantics and pragmatics of these items. The first one derives the ignorance component as a quantity implicature that arises via competition with alternative domains of quantification (Alonso-Ovalle and Menendez-Benito 2003, 2008, 2010, 2011; Chierchia 2006; Fălăus 2009, 2011a,b, 2012; Kratzer and Shimoyama, 2002). The second one claims that the ignorance effect comes about because epistemic indefinites impose a shift on the method of identification required by the context (Aloni 2012; Aloni and Port forthcoming). Although both approaches have improved our understanding of epistemic indefinites, we conclude that neither of them predicts the whole range of variation attested to date.

Exceptional Scope: The Case of Spanish

Unlike run-of-the-mill quantifiers, indefinites can escape islands. Schwarzschild (J Semant 19(3):289–314, 2002) connects this behavior with domain restriction: On his analysis, indefinites are existential quantifiers that get apparent exceptional scope when their domain is restricted to a singleton. The Spanish indefinites un and algun provide an ideal testing ground for Schwarzschild’s theory. Since un can be a singleton indefinite but algun cannot (Alonso-Ovalle and Menendez-Benito, Nat Lang Semant 18(1): 1–31, 2010, (2008b) Minimal domain widening. In: Abner N, Bishop J (eds) Proceedings of the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, pp 36–44), we only expect un to have exceptional scope. This chapter tests this prediction experimentally by looking at the behavior of these indefinites in relative clauses and the antecedent of conditionals. The results yield a modulation of the predicted pattern: (1) In relative clauses, un can have exceptional scope, but exceptional scope is also available for algun to some extent; (2) in conditionals, exceptional scope is impossible for algun and hard for un. This difference between the two types of islands is puzzling for most theories of indefinites. We put forward an account cast within Kratzer and Shimoyama’s ((2002) Indeterminate pronouns: the view from Japanese. In: Otsu Y (ed) Proceedings of the 3rd Tokyo conference on psycholinguistics, pp 1–25) Hamblin semantics, on which indefinites denote sets of alternatives that expand until they meet an appropriate operator. Under this account, the differences between the two islands come about through the interplay of the alternatives introduced by the indefinite and the operators associated with each syntactic configuration.

A Note on the Derivation of the Epistemic Effect of Spanish Algún as an Implicature

Cross-linguistically we find epistemic indefinites,1 existential determiners that signal ignorance on the part of the speaker. Some such indefinites are German irgendein (Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002, Kratzer 2005, Aloni and Port forthcoming), English some (Becker 1999, Farkas 2002b), Spanish algun (Alonso-Ovalle and Menendez-Benito 2003, 2008, 2010) and Romanian vreun (Farkas 2002a, 2006, Fӑlӑus 2009, 2011). Consider, as illustration, the Spanish sentence in (1) below. By using algun, the speaker signals that she cannot identify the doctor that Maria married. As a result, the namely continuation, which identifies the doctor in question, is distinctly odd.