TY  - JOUR
A1  - De Veaugh-Geiss, Joseph P.
A1  - Toennis, Swantje
A1  - Onea, Edgar
A1  - Zimmermann, Malte
T1  - That’s not quite it
BT  - an experimental investigation of (non‑)exhaustivity in clefts
JF  - Semantics and pragmatics
N2  - 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.
KW  - experimental study
KW  - exhaustivity
KW  - es-clefts
KW  - definite pseudoclefts
KW  - anaphoric existence presupposition
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.11.3
SN  - 1937-8912
VL  - 11
PB  - Linguistic Society of America
CY  - Washington
ER  -