The standard view on additive particles like too and also is that they presuppose a salient, distinct alternative to their Focused constituent. In a first part of this project, I argue on the basis of data from additives in but-clauses that additives make reference to the QUD and can be represented as the negation of the exhaustification operator. The second, not fully developed, part concerns differences between additives like too and also in English, which have been implicitly assumed to be semantically equivalent, and other languages. I hypothesize that the interaction with prosody and the meaning it conveys is crucial in understanding these differences. A third part, which is still in preparation, focuses on cases of so-called double additives: sentences where two additives felicitously co-occur and seem to associate with the same element.
Output:
– Contrasting additives: on obligatoriness, coherence and the QUD. Invited talk at the Departmental Colloquium (“Linguistischer Arbeitskreis”), University of Cologne, June 2018. [handout]
– Additives in ‘but’-clauses: ‘also’ as the Negation of EXH. Poster at 36th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL36) @UCLA, April 2018. [poster]
– Dividing Additives: On too, also and German auch. Talk at SNEWS 2016 @ Brown University, November 2016. [handout]
alex göbel 