The Syntax-Semantics Group will hold its first meeting of 2026 on Thursday, January 15, at 2-3pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/84180431566
Mathieu Paillé (ZAS) and David Blunier (Université de Poitiers) will be presenting “Evidence for emergent negation in alternatives” Here is the abstract:
- It is a standard view in semantics that many phenomena, from implicatures to the meanings of operators like ‘only,’ involve sets of alternatives. However, it is not always clear what a sentence’s alternatives are, and what factors are involved in deciding on this. This talk focuses on the alternatives for sentences with focused predicates; we motivate empirically that such sentences have alternatives with emergent negation. For instance, utterances with focused ‘poodle’ have an alternative obtained by replacing ‘poodle’ not with other predicates like ‘labrador,’ but with the negative phrase ‘non-poodle.’ We then discuss consequences of this proposal for two matters of debate in the literature on alternatives: whether alternatives are linguistic or ‘conceptual,’ and whether there is a constraint against alternatives that are syntactically more complex than an utterance.