Speaker: Ekaterina Vostrikova (UMass-Amherst),

Title: Clausal and Phrasal Exceptives

When: Friday, April 6, 2:15

Where: ILC N400

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Clausal and phrasal exceptives

Exceptive constructions in English, like (1), come with the following

inferences: John is a boy and he did not come, every other boy came (Horn

1989, von Fintel 1994).

(1) Every boy except John came.

Exceptives are never compatible with existential quantifiers (2).

(2) The distribution puzzle: *Some boy(s) except John came

Von Fintel’s (1994) theory of exceptives straightforwardly accounts for all of

these facts. According to this theory, “except” introduces a set ({John} in

(1)) that it subtracts from the domain of a quantifier and adds the minimality

condition: this is the minimal set that has to be subtracted in order for the

quantificational claim to be true.

However, it has been argued in the literature that complements of some

exceptive markers are reduced clauses (Garcia Alvarez 2008, Pérez-Jiménez

& Moreno-Quibén 2012 on Spanish, Soltan 2016 on Arabic) and thus do not

introduce a set of individuals.

In this talk I will show how von Fintel’s semantics for exceptives can be extended to clausal exceptives.