[Joing Meeting with SRG] Minimal sufficiency and scalar concord in German, English and Chinese

Our talk is concerned with Minimal Sufficiency (MS) as in (1) and (2). (Grosz 2011 coined the term, but the data had been around for decades.)

(1) Tylenole alone will help here already. (2) If the weather is just so-so, I will go hiking already.

MS sentences share two characteristics: (i) conditions that are surprisingly easy to fulfill suffice to for a state-of-affairs to obtain; (ii) a scalarly interpreted ‘only’ word takes local scope (alone in (1), just in (2)). The existing literature on MS has largely focused on these two properties (Berends & Kaufmann 2009,Grosz 2011, Coppock & Lindahl 2014, Liu 2017, Panizza & Sudo 2020, Wimmer 2022). We add the following major empirical points to the discussion: (i) a split between event-internal and event-external MS, with different, though similar notions of sufficiency underlying these two types (event-internal sufficiency providers bear theta-roles, event-external ones do not; Maienborn 2001) ; (ii) some languages display optional, some obligatory particle doubling (concord); (iii) Antecedents of MS constructions are upward-scalar (Panizza & Sudo 2020, Behrends & Kaufmann 2009); (iv) upward scalarity is mereology-based with event-internal MS, and informativeness-based with event-external MS; (v) Chinese offers particularly interesting and recalcitrant data defying a standard conditional treatment for at least some biclausal MS constructions.

Our analysis will argue that, particularly for the recalcitrant cases from Chinese, an implementation in terms of correlative constructions is needed (Dayal 1995, 1996). More conservative analyses remain available and, we suggest, are more intuitively justified for the simpler cases. On the syntactic side, we offer a morphosyntactic account of the phenomenon of scalar particle doubling, which is crucial for the Chinese case. Lastly, we will demonstrate how the syntactic side of our proposal makes the right predictions concerning the discovery of new MS data types.