Expletive negation and the decomposition of only

This thesis is focused on the seemingly superfluous sentential negation showing up in Hebrew until-clauses. I discuss a scalar implicature arising from until-clauses which surprisingly becomes uncancellable when this negation is present. I argue that this inference becomes obligatory due to the presence of an only-like exhaustivity operator, which gets (partially) spelled out as negation since it is composed of negation and an exceptive. Moreover, this negation is shown to share more properties with only.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Margulis, Daniel,S.M.Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Martin Hackl.

• Linguistics and Philosophy.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/124087

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/124087