Exceptives under negation: Strengthening the case for p-Exh

Andreea Nicolae (ZAS)
Aron Hirsch (University of Maryland, College Park)
Anamaria Falaus (CNRS)

The sentence I saw everyone but John conveys (a) that I saw everyone who isn’t John (the ‘subtractive’ inference), and (b) that I didn’t see John (the ‘negative’ inference).  Recent analyses derive these via an exhaustivity operator (Gajewski 2013, Hirsch 2016, Crnič 2018, 2021, Mayr & Vostrikova 2022).  We consider predictions when the clause containing the exceptive is negated.  Our findings indicate that exceptives can occur in the scope of negation, but different inferences result depending on which element in the exceptive construction is produced with main stress.  We suggest that the data are expected if the subtractive inference is asserted, but the negative inference presupposed (e.g. Vostrikova 2021, Crnič 2023).  Adopting the exhaustification approach, we thus take the exhaustivity operator which co-occurs with exceptives to be p**resuppositional (as in Bassi et al. 2021, 2023, Crnič 2023).