Past Event

Deriving Epistemic and Concessive readings: the case of at least.

Dr. Maria Biezma Garrido
Contract Instructor, Linguistics
(Carleton University)

Nakanishi & Rullman (2009) (henceforth N&R) observed that sentences containing at least, (1), have two possible readings, a concessive reading (CON) and an epistemic reading (EP).

1.

a. Mary won at least a silver medal

b. At least Mary won a silver medal

EPISTEMIC: The speaker does not know whether the speaker won a silver medal or whether she did better.
CONCESSIVE: Although a gold medal is preferable, a silver medal is somehow Satisfactory.

N&R claim that these readings are usually linked to different syntactic positions: when at least is high (1b) CON is preferred, whereas in (1a) only EP is available. The authors claim that at least is a sentential operator and propose two different denotations in order to account for the different readings. In particular, N&R propose that epistemic at least indicates that in at least (α), the proposition α is part of a scale and that there are other alternatives ranked higher than α that may be true (following Krifka 1999, Geurts & Nouwen 2007 and Buring 2008); on the other hand, the concessive at least truth conditions merely require that α be true and additional meanings are the result of conventional implicatures.

In this talk I propose that the syntactic distribution does not solely predict whether the intended readings is a CON or an EP. Furthermore, I propose that once we take into consideration the role played by context in deriving alternatives, and the speakerfs discourse goals, we can do with a single denotation for at least that derives both readings.

About the Presenter

Dr. Maria Biezma Garrido is an instructor at SLaLS, teaching courses on semantics and psycholinguistics. She received her PhD from UMass Amherst in 2011. Her research interests center on semantics and its interfaces with pragmatics and syntax.