Ekaterina Vostrikova (Russian Academy of Sciences/Göttingen)
Conditional analysis for clausal exceptives
This talk is about English exceptive constructions introduced byexcept. 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 this analysis derives
the inferences 'except' contributes to sentences it occurs in and the
restrictions on its use. I also show how this approach 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 or modal phrases such as 'possibly'.