Ceteris paribusiness: Salience and CP-override

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Laurence Horn

Yale University

Sally McConnell-Ginet 

Cornell University

 

The effect of the salience of exceptions on the viability of ceteris paribus conditions has long been observed within separate domains of linguistic inquiry without being recognized as a unified phenomenon. Thus, because males are prototype/default members of the category HUMAN, sex-neutral man and he are (variably) acceptable when a proposition can be verified by male exemplars. But when this is implausible in the context, sex-neutral interpretations are degraded:

(1)   a.  Man is the only mammal capable of {suicide/rape}.

        b.  Man is the only mammal that {blushes/#menstruates}.

(2)   a.  Each man kills the thing he loves.
        b.  #Everyone should be free to decide for himself whether or not to have an abortion.

 

Similarly, if the syntax foregrounds the possibility of female referents, he becomes impossible: “In contexts where femaleness has been made explicit or is especially salient, it is difficult to use he even where there is no reference to a specific individual” (McConnell-Ginet 1988: 93), as seen in (3)-(5).

(3)  Any boy (#or girl) who thinks he knows the answer…  (McConnell-Ginet 1979)

(4)  Every child must learn to wash his {genitals/#penis or vagina}.  (Horn & Kleinedler 2000)

(5)  #Either the husband or the wife has perjured himself.  (Pullum 2004)

 

McConnell-Ginet’s principle can be extended, mutatis mutandis, to other phenomena in which default or ceteris paribus conditions are tacitly invoked, including conditionals, generics, and conversational implicatures, for example:

 

 (6)      a.  If I strike this match, it will light.  (True)

           b.  If I strike this match and {it’s wet/ I have first soaked it in water}, it will light                          (False)

           c.  If I strike this match and it’s (either) wet or not wet, it will light. (False)

           (Warmbrod 1981, Herburger & Mauck 2011)  

 

Similarly, the availability of presupposition accommodation (Lewis 1979)—

(7)  I have to pick up my sister at the airport.         [OK even if you didn’t know I have a sister]

 

—is diminished if the presupposition to be accommodated is rendered controversial (von Fintel 2008):

                                                                                                                             

(8)       A:  Don’t lie to me, I know for a fact that you don’t have a sister.                                                                                        B: #I have to pick her up at the airport.

 

This range of phenomena, from “he/man language” to conditionals and presupposition accommodation, thus motivates a generalization of McConnell-Ginet’s principle, CP-Override:

“If material inconsistent with a ceteris paribus assumption is made salient in a discourse context, that ceteris paribus assumption is overridden.”

 

 

 

References

von Fintel, Kai (2008). What is presupposition accommodation, again? Philosophical Perspectives 22: 137-70.

Herburger, Elena & Simon Mauck (2011). Strict conditionals, conditionally. Unpublished ms., Georgetown U.

Horn, Laurence & Steven Kleinedler (2000).  Parasitic reference meets R-based narrowing: The case of he-man language.  Paper presented at LSA meeting, Chicago.

Lewis, David (1979). Scorekeeping in a language game. Journal of Philosophical Logic 8: 339-59.

McConnell-Ginet, Sally (1979).  Prototypes, pronouns and persons.  Reprinted as Chapter 9 in her Gender, Sexuality, and Meaning, 185-206. Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2011.

McConnell-Ginet, Sally (1988).  Language and gender.  In F. Newmeyer, ed., Language:  The Cambridge Survey, Vol. IV, 75-99.  Cambridge:  Cambridge U. Press.

Pullum, Geoffrey (2004). Canada Supreme Court gets the grammar right.  Language Log post, 8.18.04.  http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001362.html.

Warmbrod, Kenneth (1981). Counterfactuals and susbstitution of equivalent antecedents. Journal of Philosophical Logic 10: 267-89.