Departmental Colloquium in Linguistics: Ekaterina Vostrikova (Russian Academy of Sciences) - "Conditional analysis for clausal exceptives"

This talk is about English exceptive constructions introduced by except. I argue that the existing  approaches to the semantics of exceptives cannot apply to this construction because they assume that what follows an exceptive marker is an individual denoting expression. I argue that except-exceptives can be derived from full clauses by ellipsis.  I offer a compositional analysis for this clausal exceptive construction. I propose that except introduces quantification over possible situations and the clause following it provides the restriction for this quantification. I show how the analysis developed here derives the inferences except contributes to sentences it occurs in and the restrictions on its use. I also show how the approach developed here captures the cases traditional approaches to the semantics of exceptives cannot capture such as cases where an except-phrase contains a PP or multiple syntactic constituents. The approach I propose correctly captures the NPI licensing facts inside except-phrases. 

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