מאמר חדש של ד"ר משה בר-לב וד"ר איתי בשיא

פורסם מאמר חדש של ד"ר משה בר-לב וד"ר איתי בשיא מאוניברסיטת בן-גוריון בשם:

Infelicity with homogeneity: focus, not (necessarily) presupposition

 (פורסם ב- Journal of Semantics - Oxford)

:תקציר

A prominent but much-debated theory of the homogeneous behavior of sentences containing definite plurals is that homogeneity arises as the result of a presupposition. Wehbe (2022) and Guerrini and Wehbe (2024) present new arguments for this view based on the observation that definite plurals are infelicitous in certain contexts where one expects them to be infelicitous if homogeneity is a presupposition. We argue that a closer scrutiny of the empirical picture reveals that the infelicity in the cases they discuss is due to independent requirements from focus, and suggests the opposite conclusion, namely that sentences with definite plurals do not themselves give rise to a homogeneity presupposition. We further argue that, when such a presupposition does arise, it is due to the background question (questions under discussion) rather than the sentence itself. We entertain a possible path to reconciling our arguments with the assumption that definite plurals trigger a homogeneity presupposition by making certain assumptions about presupposition accommodation.

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