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Conditional analysis of clausal exceptives

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Abstract

In this paper I argue that English exceptive constructions introduced by except can be derived from full clauses by ellipsis. I offer a compositional analysis for this clausal exceptive construction. I propose that except introduces quantification over possible situations and the clause following it provides the restriction for this quantification. I show how the analysis developed here derives the inferences except contributes to sentences it occurs in and the restrictions on its use. I also show how this approach captures certain cases which traditional approaches to the semantics of exceptives do not, such as cases where an except-phrase contains a PP or multiple syntactic constituents. The approach I propose correctly captures the NPI licensing facts inside except-phrases. In addition, this is the first approach to the semantics of exceptives that correctly captures the contribution of modal phrases such as possibly inside except-phrases.

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Notes

  1. I do not make a claim here that exceptives introduced by except must always be clausal.

  2. This analogy between exceptives and conditionals was observed by Hoeksema (1990, 1995), but his work does not pursue the analysis of exceptives in terms of quantification over possible situations.

  3. I am grateful to Aron Hirsch (p.c.), who shared with me his observation that possibly only targets the negative inference.

  4. Following common practice, I switch back and forth between function talk and set talk in my exposition of (Moltmann 1995).

  5. There is one caveat here. In cases where the set introduced by except has only one individual, as in (i), and there is exactly one girl in the world, the Homogeneity Condition is met. In order to address this issue, Moltmann proposes that the Homogeneity Condition has to be satisfied “not only with respect to one particular model, but with respect to certain other models” (Moltmann 1995:242).

    1. (i)

      *Some girl except Eva came.

  6. Not all English speakers find exactly acceptable inside except-phrases.

  7. The observation that except can host a PP that does not have a correlate in the main clause was independently and simultaneously made by Potsdam and Polinsky (2019), who also argued that English except can be a clausal exceptive construction.

  8. This proof is built on the general proof that von Fintel (1994) provides. The set-theoretic tautologies employed here are as follows. For any sets A, B, and C:

    1. (i)

      (A∩B̅)⊆C̅ = (A∩C)⊆B

    1. (ii)

      ∀Y[A⊆Y → B⊆Y] = B⊆A

  9. This would be a development of ideas about the syntax of exceptive constructions expressed by Reinhart (1991) and García Álvarez (2008).

  10. Stockwell and Wong (2020) also argued that except-phrases can involve ellipsis and that ellipsis is resolved with a polarity mismatch, based on the fact that except-phrases can serve as antecedents to sprouting with negation in the ellipsis site, as in John likes everyone except Ann, but I don’t know why .

  11. Some people I consulted with did not find examples like (63) fully acceptable.

  12. Interestingly, the exceptive construction introduced by but does not show a similar contrast: NPIs are not licensed inside but-phrases independently of whether the quantifier is universal or negative (as shown in (i) and (ii)). Another fact about but-exceptives is that they do not show traces of a clausal structure: the maximal syntactic constituent they can host is a DP (as shown in (iv)). Those facts can be taken as an argument supporting the idea that but-exceptives are not underlyingly clausal.

    1. (i)

      *John danced with everyone but any girl from his class.

    1. (ii)

      *John danced with no one but any girl from his class.

    1. (iii)

      I met a student from every city in Spain but Barcelona.

    1. (iv)

      *I met a student from every city in Spain but from Barcelona.

  13. Fălăuş and Nicolae (2016) and Pasquereau (2020) argue that a covert negation can be inserted in a high projection as a last-resort rescuing mechanism only when a part of the structure has been elided. Thus, it is possible that it is not the case that the ellipsis site contains negation in (84), but rather a covert negation is inserted high in the structure inside the except-clause, which is forced by the meaning of except and is possible because ellipsis is involved. I leave this issue for future research.

  14. This idea is based on von Fintel’s (1994) way of modeling quantifier domain restriction.

  15. Domain subtraction is expressed as existential quantification over possible situations, which makes this analysis different from the standard analysis of bare conditionals, which are usually understood as restrictors of universal quantifiers over possible situations. The quantification can be universal if we change the restrictor and add the condition that the original proposition in the except-clause is false in the considered situations, as shown below in (i). The choice in favor of existential quantification was made rather arbitrarily here.

    1. (i)

      ∀s[(Eva came in s & ∀p[(p ≠ λs’. ¬Eva came in s’ & p∈〚EvaF did not come〛gF) → p(s) = p(s0)]) → ∀x[x is a girl in → x came in s]]

  16. In this respect English except behaves like a typical connected exceptive by Hoeksema’s (1987, 1995) criteria. It can only appear in the position directly adjacent to a quantificational DP or at the end of a sentence.

    1. (i)

      Every girl except Eva came.

    1. (ii)

      Every girl came except Eva.

    1. (iii)

      *Except Eva every girl came.

    Compare this with a free exceptive except for, which is fine in all three positions.

    1. (iv)

      Every girl except for Eva came.

    1. (v)

      Every girl came except for Eva.

    1. (vi)

      Except for Eva, every girl came.

    It also behaves like a typical connected exceptive with plural definite descriptions:

    1. (vii)

      *The girls except Eva came.

    1. (viii)

      Except for Eva, the girls came.

  17. Ellipsis is resolved positively if the generalization is negative even if the quantifier is every:

    1. (i)

      Every girl did not come except Eva came.

  18. The argument presented here would apply also to cases with plural indefinites, such as (i). The predicted law-like relation would be as follows: in every situation where Eva did not come, it is false that some girls of s0 came. That can only hold if Eva is the only girl in s0 or if there are no girls in s0. The second option is incompatible with the assertive content, which requires that there is a possible situation where some girls of s0 came. This means that in addition to the issues discussed in this section, there will be a conflict between the plural marking on the noun and the presupposition requiring that Eva is the only girl in s0.

    1. (i)

      *Some girls came except EvaF did not come.

  19. This was pointed out to me by Kyle Johnson and Keny Chatain (p.c.).

  20. In the LF in (171) we need to pay attention to the situation variables inside the clause introduced by except. This is an IP that contains two predicates: the one denoted by the NP present from my mom and the one denoted by got. Potentially, there are two possible options for the situation variable inside the NP: it can be bound by the abstractor inside its own clause 5 or it can be bound by the highest abstractor 4 (in this case the predicate will get the transparent evaluation, i.e. it will be evaluated with respect to the topic situation s0 and not be bound by the quantifier over situations). In the LF in (171) I have chosen the latter option. The reasoning behind that choice is as follows. If both of the variables (the one on the predicate get and the one on the NP present from my mom) were bound by the same abstractor 5, then Conditional Leastness would have been as shown in (i), where the variable that has changed is boxed.

    1. (i)

      ∀s[∃x[x is a present from my mom in & I got x in s] → ∃y[y is a present in s0 & I got y in s]]

    This presupposition is very hard to satisfy. The reason for this is that something can be a present in one possible situation and not be a present in another. According to (i), every situation that has a thing that is a present from my mom in that situation is such that it has a thing that is a present in s0. This condition can only be met by a predicate that does not change its extension from situation to situation. It does not seem likely that the predicate denoted by presents has this property. However, we do not need to worry about the derivation that leads to this very strong presupposition. Nothing in the system forces the two situation variables to carry the same index. What is important is that there is an LF—the one shown in (171)—that leads to the correct interpretation.

  21. I thank Kyle Johnson (p.c.) for the observation that it is only the type of the correlates of the remnants that matters.

  22. Some speakers of English find this example grammatical under the interpretation where (194) is equivalent to (192).

  23. Following Moltmann (1995), I assume that dance with is not a symmetric predicate. The assumption is that there is a possible situation where Eva danced with Bill, but Bill did not dance with Eva (say, he was unconscious, and she just carried him during the dance). The reason why this assumption is required is that otherwise the presupposition can be satisfied if Eva is a boy in s0 and Bill is a girl in s0.

  24. Not all speakers of English find this sentence grammatical. For some speakers the phrasal version of the sentence is preferred (the version without with). Everyone I consulted with found the example I met a student from every city in Spain except from Barcelona acceptable. I do not know what the relevant difference between those two examples is.

  25. For simplicity I represented the movement of the except-clause as a leftward movement in these LFs.

  26. (246) would be compatible with there being no boys in s0 if there were no girls in s0. This is because the universal quantification is true if its restrictor is empty. However, the part of the presupposition bolded in (244) is not compatible with this scenario.

  27. Nothing would go wrong here if the set of focus alternatives included also the propositions where the individual corresponding to the subject of the sentence denoting this proposition is plural. I make this assumption for simplicity of exposition.

  28. Rooth (1996) discusses some cases where the focus alternatives are computed for a trace of an expression that is marked with a focus.

  29. Moltmann (1995) and García Álvarez (2008) point out that possibly can occur in exceptive constructions, but do not discuss how the meaning of such sentences can be constructed in a compositional way.

  30. The prediction von Fintel’s approach makes is correct for but-exceptives: but-exceptives cannot host such modals as possibly: *Every girl came but, possibly, Eva. This is another fact that supports the idea that but-exceptives are not underlyingly clausal.

  31. This is achieved via a reference to a specific sentence structure and a syncategorematic definition for the notions of generalization and instantiation that identify the restrictor of a quantifier by its position in the sentence structure. An advantage of the analysis in terms of possible worlds/situations proposed here is that we do not need to make a reference to a specific sentence structure to capture the containment inference; we can simply use the world/situation variable mechanism that allows the predicate inside a DP to be intensionally independent from the main predicate. Sentences with except can have different structures, and it does not seem plausible that we can give one syncategorematic definition that covers all cases (for example, sentences with one remnant can have one quantifier; sentences with multiple remnants must have multiple quantifiers).

  32. I thank Lucas Champollion who suggested that I explore this idea.

  33. The only reason why the number of alternatives is restricted to three is that it makes counting easier; this number corresponds to the minimal number of girls needed in order for most girls to have a defined meaning.

  34. One idea of a unified propositional treatment of phrasal exceptives is suggested and explored in Vostrikova (2019b:404-436).

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    Ekaterina Vostrikova

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This project originated from my UMass Amherst dissertation. I am grateful to my advisors Seth Cable, Rajesh Bhatt, Kyle Johnson, and Barbara Partee for all of their help with this project. I am grateful to the audiences of SuSurrus and the Semantics Workshop at UMass Amherst, and to the linguistic community of UMass in general, for their comments and judgments. I would also like to thank Daniel Altshuler, Peter Alrenga, Kai von Fintel, Aron Hirsch, Sabine Iatridou, Edward Keenan, Petr Kusliy, Roumyana Pancheva, Clemens Steiner-Mayr, two anonymous reviewers, and the editors of Natural Language Semantics for their comments, which helped me to improve this work substantively. A part of this project was presented at SALT-29 (May 2019, see Vostrikova 2019a for proceedings paper) and another part at SuB-24 (September 2019). I am grateful to the audiences for their comments and suggestions. All errors are my own.

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Vostrikova, E. Conditional analysis of clausal exceptives. Nat Lang Semantics 29, 159–227 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-021-09177-z

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