As Sabine Iatridou and I are putting the finishing touches on another collaboration, I am struck yet again by the puzzle raised by the ritual incantation: “The authors appear in alphabetical order.”

It is clear what the sentence is used to convey: that the order of the authors’ names is not meant to reflect the importance of their contributions but was solely determined by the alphabetical order (F before I, in our case). But how do we manage to convey that with this sentence?

Is it that “alphabetical order” here has as its semantic content “an order determined by the order of the alphabet” rather than “an order consistent with the order of the alphabet”?

If so, we have to concede that “alphabetical order” must be ambiguous, since it is not a contradiction to say that “the authors appear in alphabetical order, but only accidentally so”.

Alternatively, we might want to tell a Gricean story. What is said by the sentence is a near triviality: anyone looking at the list of authors and a knowledge of the alphabet will realize that the order is consistent with the order of the alphabet.#1 So, the cooperative hearer will draw the inference that more is meant: namely, that the truth of the sentence is more than an accident.

The Gricean story would actually be a natural ingredient in an ambiguity story as well, since the near triviality of the sentence under one of its putative readings would serve as an incentive to resolve the ambiguity towards the more informative reading.

Lastly, one could imagine an analysis that says that the sentence does say that the order was non-accidentally determined by the alphabet but that the source of that reading is not a lexical ambiguity but lies in the presence of a covert “generic” operator. Something like this is often appealed to when dealing with the apparent ambiguity of a sentence like “Every coin in my pocket is silver”#2, which can be taken to convey an accidental generalization (“it just so happens that currently every coin in my pocket is silver”) or can convey a lawlike generalization (“as a matter of policy, I allow only silver coins in my pocket”). Reinterpretation of a (near) triviality as conveying a lawlike generalization happens with surface tautologies like “Boys will be boys” (but this also involves reinterpreting the predicate as referring to stereoptypical properties of boys).

I am thinking about expanding this into a squib, but would like to hear whether readers share my befuddlement and what their guesses at the appropriate analysis are.