S-Lab - Luisa Seguin / The syntax and semantics of Italian exceptive-exclusive constructions
S-Lab - Luisa Seguin / The syntax and semantics of Italian exceptive-exclusive constructions
Tuesday April 30, S-Lab has Luisa Seguin presenting her work on exceptive constructions in Italian, abstracted below.
Exceptive constructions express an exception to a generalization (Potsdam, 2019; Vostrikova, 2021). In Except Mary every student came, the exceptive phrase except Mary is subtracted from the domain of the associate every student. Moreover, there is the negative entailment: everyone who isn't Mary came and Mary did not come. English exceptives (e.g. except) are restricted to universal quantifier associates: #Except Mary, some students came.
In Italian, on the other hand, there is no such restriction: eccetto constructions can co-occur with universal quantifiers (Eccetto Yuri, ho visto tutti. 'Eccetto Yuri, I saw everyone.'), as well as existential ones and numerals (Eccetto Yuri, ho visto alcuni/tre studenti. 'Eccetto Yuri, I saw some/three students.'), as well as wh-words (Eccetto Yuri, chi hai visto? 'Eccetto Yuri, who did you see?'). Yet in the latter case they are interpreted as exclusives. Exclusive constructions, as in the English Excluding Mary, every/some student came, express exclusion: the speaker is not making any statement about Mary coming.
In this talk, I will argue that eccetto + universal quantifiers constructions (1) are ‘true exceptives’: they carry all three inferences. Furthermore, they have an underlying clausal structure, which involves ellipsis. On the other hand, eccetto + existential quantifiers, numerals, and wh-words constructions (2) are phrasal. Furthermore, the latter do not carry any of the inferences mentioned above. In fact, they subtract an entity, the exception, from the common ground, thus acting at the speech level, in an ‘anti-topic’ behavior.