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Readings of scalar particles: noch/still

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Abstract

The paper develops a uniform compositional analysis of the various readings of the scalar particle still and its German counterpart noch. Noch/still is a presuppositional scalar particle that gives rise to implicatures. Interpretive possibilities arise through different choices for the scale that the particle associates with, different attachment sites in the syntax, and interaction with focus. These interpretive parameters allow for a wide range of possible sentence interpretations, which overlap, but do not coincide for still and noch. The contrastive perspective allows us to examine the role of scales in the grammar. The implicatures triggered by the scalar item open an interesting perspective for the generation of implicatures in general.

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Acknowledgments

I am very greatful to the editor Malte Zimmermann and to three anonymous reviewers, who were extremely helpful in improving the paper, from the first version I submitted to the present result. I would like to thank the participants of my Universität Tübingen seminars 2013, 2016 and 2018 for helpful discussion. Thank you also to the audiences at Universität Göttingen, MIT and UMass Amherst 2015, the STECHOW workshop at Sinn und Bedeutung 2015 and at SALT 2016. This research was supported by the DFG grant to the SFB 833.

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    Sigrid Beck

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Beck, S. Readings of scalar particles: noch/still. Linguist and Philos 43, 1–67 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-018-09256-1

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