Exhaustivity

Inlinguistics,exhaustivityis the phenomenon where apropositioncan be strengthened with thenegationof certain alternatives. For example, in response to the question "Which students got an A?", the utterance "Ava got an A" has anexhaustive interpretationwhen it conveys that no other students got an A. It has anon-exhaustive interpretationwhen it merely conveys that Ava was among the students who got an A.

Exhaustivity is a major topic in the linguistic subfields ofsemanticsandpragmatics.Research on the topic aims to explain when and why expressions receive exhaustive interpretations. Particular factors includefocus,disjunction,questions,andpolarity items.A major theoretical issue is whether exhaustivity is a semanticentailmentencoded in thegrammar,a pragmaticimplicaturearising fromGriceansocial cognition,or some combination of the two.

See also

• Alternative semantics
• Focus
• Free choice inference
• Scalar implicature

Bibliography

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