Larry Horn on “Any” and on Border Wars

Laurence R. Horn: 2005. “Airport ‘86 Revisited: Toward a unified indefinite any“. to appear in G. Carlson & F. J. Pelletier (eds.), The Partee Effect. Stanford: CSLI, 2005.

Awaiting a flight at Boston’s Logan Airport on September 2, 1986, Barbara Partee jotted down some thoughts on the age-old question “Is there a way to unify negative polarity any and free choice any?” Reflecting on the relation of the two any’s to the distribution of almost, Fauconnier (1975) superlatives, comparatives and equatives, she asked semi-rhetorically:

“[I]s it possible that both any’s are instances of a single any which has an interpretation something like a minimal existential, and/or like an ‘arbitrary’ existential (here I’m searching for a way to unify ‘minimal’ as ‘arbitrarily small’ and ‘free choice’ as ‘arbitrarily selected’), and the differences in the constructions derive from the differences in the implicature-generated scales that go upward from or downward to this arbitrarily chosen or arbitrarily small existential point?” (Partee 1986: 3/2003: 236-37)

As suggested by the form of her question and by work subsequent to and partially inspired by the Airport Squib, such a unified approach is as possible as it is desirable. But how do we get one?

Laurence R. Horn: 2005. The Border Wars: a neo-Gricean perspective. In K. Turner & K. von Heusinger (eds.), Where Semantics Meets Pragmatics. Elsevier, 2005.

In reports filed from several fronts in the semantics/pragmatics border wars, I seek to bolster the loyalist (neo-)Gricean forces against various recent revisionist sorties, including (but not limited to) the relevance-theoretic view on which the maxims (or more specifically their sole surviving descendant, the principle of relevance) inform truth-conditional content through the determination of “explicatures”, Levinson’s defense of implicatures serving as input to logical form, recent arguments by Mira Ariel for a semantic treatment of the upper bound (‘not all’) for propositions of the form Most F are G, and Chierchia’s proposal to reanalyze implicatures as part of compositional semantics. I argue for drawing the semantics/pragmatics boundary in a relatively traditional way, maintaining a constrained characterization of what is said, while adopting a variant of Kent Bach’s position on “impliciture” and supporting the Gricean conception of implicature as an aspect of speaker meaning, as opposed to its reconstruction in terms of default inference or utterance interpretation. I survey current controversies concerning the meaning and acquisition of disjunction and other scalar operators, the relation of subcontrariety and its implications for lexicalization, the nature of polarity licensing, and the innateness controversy. In each case, I seek to emphasize the significance of the generalizations that a (neo-)classical pragmatic approach enables us to capture.