Updating Contexts: Ignorance and Concession

Abstract

Superlative modifiers (SMs) such as at least shows an intriguing ambiguity between a reading conveying speaker concession (CON) and an epistemic reading conveying speaker ignorance (EPI). While it is an going debate on whether such EPI-CON ambiguity should be a case of homophony (e.g., Nakanishi and Rullmann 2009; Cohen and Krifka 2014) or arises from only one lexical entry (Biezma 2013), it seems to receive relatively little attention on how an assertion with at least under the two readings updates the discourse. This paper fills the research gap by considering how an assertion with at least in the discourse fares with respect to diagnostics of (not-)at-issue content, and presenting a pragmatic analysis capturing their different discourse profiles under the system of conversational scoreboard in Farkas and Bruce (2010) and subsequently developed by others (e.g., Malamud and Stephenson 2015). In particular, the speaker is committed to both the truth of the prejacent and the falsity of the higher alternatives under CON. By contrast, the speaker is only committed to the possibility that the prejacent is true and the possibility that some higher alternative is true in subsequent discourse. This modal flavor of at least arises at the level of discourse, rather than lexical semantics (e.g., via a covert epistemic modal). Finally, it is shown that the pragmatic analysis can be extended to expressions in other languages such as Chinese zhishao ‘at least’, which also demonstrates the familiar EPI-CON ambiguity.