Tel Aviv UniversityThe Lester & Sally Entin Faculty of HumanitiesThe Shirley & Leslie Porter School of Cultural Studies

Exhaustivity

A Semantic Account of ‘Quantity’ Implicatures

THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE “DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY”by

Aldo Sevi

SUBMITTED TO THE SENATE OF TEL AVIV UNIVERSITYMarch 2005i

This work was carried out under the supervision of

Prof. Fred Landman

Acknowledgments

This dissertation has roots in two seminars taught by my advisor, Fred Landman someyears ago. One – on the meaning of

only

, the other – on the adjectival theory of indefinite predicates and arguments. Since my early days in the linguistics departmentat Tel Aviv University, I knew that if I were to write a Ph.D. dissertation, it would be(against my better judgment) about implicatures. But who could have guessed thiswould involve so many

’s…First and foremost I would like to express my gratitude to my advisor Fred Landman,who kept faith in me even when I lost it. Under his patient, kind, confident andencouraging supervision, I managed to develop, slowly but surely, a crude idea(which barely held a few pages) to the bulk of this thesis.I thank Nirit Kadmon for her very helpful comments on an early draft of chapter 1,and for our discussions on the ideas developed in this dissertation. I will always begrateful to Nirit for introducing me to the field of semantics.I’m grateful to Alex Grosu and to Fred Landman for generous financial supportduring the years I’ve been their research assistant on their joint project, and on AlexGrosu’s projects, funded by the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities.iii