@article{DeVeaughGeissToennisOneaetal.2018, author = {De Veaugh-Geiss, Joseph P. and Toennis, Swantje and Onea, Edgar and Zimmermann, Malte}, title = {That's not quite it}, series = {Semantics and pragmatics}, volume = {11}, journal = {Semantics and pragmatics}, publisher = {Linguistic Society of America}, address = {Washington}, issn = {1937-8912}, doi = {10.3765/sp.11.3}, pages = {44}, year = {2018}, abstract = {We present a novel empirical study on German directly comparing the exhaustivity inference in es-clefts to exhaustivity inferences in definite pseudoclefts, exclusives, and plain intonational focus constructions. We employ mouse-driven verification/falsification tasks in an incremental information-retrieval paradigm across two experiments in order to assess the strength of exhaustivity in the four sentence types. The results are compatible with a parallel analysis of clefts and definite pseudoclefts, in line with previous claims in the literature (Percus 1997, Buring \& Kriz 2013). In striking contrast with such proposals, in which the exhaustivity inference is conventionally coded in the cleft-structure in terms of maximality/homogeneity, our study found that the exhaustivity inference is not systematic or robust in es-clefts nor in definite pseudoclefts: Whereas some speakers treat both constructions as exhaustive, others treat both constructions as non-exhaustive. In order to account for this unexpected finding, we argue that the exhaustivity inference in both clefts and definite pseudoclefts-specifically those with the compound definite derjenige - is pragmatically derived from the anaphoric existence presupposition that is common to both constructions.}, language = {en} }