Meaning and Alternatives

Abstract

Alternatives and competition in language are pervasive at all levels of linguistic analysis. More specifically, alternatives have been argued to play a prominent role in an ever-growing class of phenomena in the investigation of natural language meaning. In this article, we focus on scalar implicatures, as they are arguably the most paradigmatic case of an alternative-based phenomenon. We first review the main challenge for theories of alternatives, the so-called symmetry problem, and we briefly discuss how it has shaped the different approaches to alternatives. We then turn to two more recent challenges concerning scalar diversity and the inferences of sentences with multiple scalars. Finally, we describe several related alternative-based phenomena and recent conceptual approaches to alternatives. As we discuss, while important progress has been made, much more work is needed both on the theoretical side and on understanding the empirical landscape better.