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20 Only and the Dynamics of Vertical Inference (53) a. #He almost {budged/slept a wink/touched a drop/spoke to anyone), b. He barely {budged/slept a wink/touched a drop/spoke to anyone). This result is especially problematic for Linebarger's theory of polarity, on which an NPI is sanctioned in a given frame in the absence of overt negation if it occurs in a proposition p that entails or implicates some other overtly negative proposition whose truth in turn 'virtually guarantees' the truth of p: (54) The Negative Implicature (NI) account of NPI licensing (Linebarger 1991: 166; cf. Linebarger 1981, 1987) a. Basic constraint: A negative polarity item NPI contributes to a sentence S expressing a proposition P the CONVENTIONAL IMPLICATURE that the following condition will be satisfied in the context of the utterance: •P entails or implicates some proposition NI, which may be identical to P; in the LF of some sentence S' expressing this negative implicatum NI, NPI occurs in the immediate scope of negation. b. Conditions on the saliency of NI: i) The AVAILABILITY requirement: The speaker must be actively attempting to convey NI by the utterance of S. ii) The STRENGTH requirement: The truth of NI itself must virtually guarantee the truth of P. iii) The FOREGROUND requirement: If NI ^ P, the representation of NPI may not occur as background information in either P or NI, nor may NI itself serve as background to P. For (5 5a) the strength requirement is presumably not met by (5 5b), but it's hard to see how the truth of (55c) could fail to guarantee that of (55a), since the two are evidently truth-conditionally identical, as Atlas (1984) has observed. ($5) a. He almost finished. b. He didn't finish. c. He didn't quite finish. Downloaded from http://jos.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on September 12, 2014 But then (56a) should provide as happy a home for an NPI as (56c) does: (56) a. He almost finished {some/*any} of the essays. b. He didn't finish any of the essays. c. He didn't quite finish any of the essays. Clearly this is not the case. On the other hand, barely passes the tests for what we might call downward quasi-entailment, the facts in (52) notwithstanding. If he's barely alive, he's barely ambulatory, ignoring the case in which he's not ambulatory at all. But if he's almost alive, it doesn't follow that he's almost ambulatory; no downward
Laurence R. Horn 21 inference is licensed. If she's barely studied linguistics, she's barely studied syntax, but not vice versa. Again, almost yields an upward rather than downward inference. But not an upward entailment, at least not if the relation in (57) is semantic. (57) They almost won >- They didn't win In fact, as has been demonstrated in a number of studies (Horn 1972; Ducrot i973;Sadock 1981; Atlas 1984; Fillmore etal. i988;Lundquist&Jarvella 1994), it's not clear just what it is. For Sadock (1981), [almost p] is true iff p is true in a world not very different from the real world; it conversationally implicates (rather than entailing or conventionally implicating) —>p. On the related and considerably earlier account of Ducrot (1973), [presque p] has a positive assertion (p is 'non loin' from being true) and a negative presupposition (p is false), while [a peine p] has the reverse characterization and is in fact virtually identical to [presque non-p]. 29 What is clear from Ducrot's account and from the patterns in (58) and (59) is the constrast between the upward scalar orientation of almost and the downward orientation of barely. (58) The tank is almost half empty -*•[ U— barely y half full almost half full—»J~ 1/2 'j-«— barely half empty J 1/2 j (59) a. Good news—My printer is almost functional! b. Bad news—My printer is barely functional! If our tank in (58) is almost half empty (or barely half full), we'd better stop to fill it, even though it contains more gasoline than if it's almost half full (or barely half empty). Similarly, I take comfort from the report that my printer is almost functional and bemoan the news that it's barely functional, even though it's in the latter case that it actually works. In each case the point of the almost sentence is to assert a positive predication even at the cost of conceding a negative, while barely has just the reverse effect. Following Stalnaker (1974, 1978), I assume that an ASSERTION is a potentially controversial proposal to increment the context by adding the content of the assertion to the store of what is already presupposed, where a PRESUPPOSITION is a proposition whose truth is either already established in the common ground or can be ACCOMMODATED to it: The RULE OF ACCOMMODATION for presupposition (Lewis 1979: 340): Downloaded from http://jos.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on September 12, 2014 If at time 1 something is said that requires presupposition P to be acceptable, and if P is not presupposed just before (, then—ceteris paribus and within certain limits—presupposition P comes into existence at (.
Page 1 and 2: Journal of Semantics 13: 1-40 © Ox
Page 3 and 4: Laurence R. Horn 3 As we shall see
Page 5 and 6: Laurence R. Horn 5 conventional but
Page 7 and 8: Laurence R. Horn 7 'ordinary' only
Page 9 and 10: Laurence R. Horn 9 OM/y-initial phr
Page 11 and 12: Laurence R. Horn 11 (25) Only Democ
Page 13 and 14: Laurence R. Horn 13 only P is S AU
Page 15 and 16: Laurence R. Horn 15 In addition to
Page 17 and 18: Laurence R. Horn 17 6 CONVERSION AN
Page 19: Laurence R. Horn 19 role of the sem
Page 23 and 24: Laurence R. Horn 23 c. —Only {Lee
Page 25 and 26: Laurence R. Horn 25 • There is a
Page 27 and 28: Laurence R. Horn 27 A glorious pict
Page 29 and 30: Laurence R. Horn 29 Our focus-of-on
Page 31 and 32: doctrine is correct, there are no g
Page 33 and 34: Laurence R. Horn 33 20 The referenc
Page 35 and 36: Laurence R. Horn 35 32 Since writin
Page 37 and 38: Laurence R. Horn 37 tides only and
Page 39 and 40: Laurence R. Horn 39 tics', in J. Gr

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