26 January 2001, DIP Colloquium, Bernhard Schwarz (IMS Stuttgart)

26 January 2001, DIP Colloquium, Bernhard Schwarz (IMS Stuttgart)
Canceled!
Speaker: Bernhard Schwarz (IMS Stuttgart)
Title: Saying "Even" in German
Former Date and Time: Friday January 26th, 2001, 15.00-17.00

Abstract:
It is known that in certain contexts even gives rise to ambiguity. For example, I doubt that he even knows Italian can be taken to suggest either that Italian is hard or that Italian is easy. Some have credited this ambiguity to the scope taking options for even, whereas others have posited a lexical ambiguity. Both accounts have been taken to carry over to German, where the two readings are expressed with different lexical items, namely sogar for the "hard" reading and auch nur for the "easy" reading. I first show that none of the accounts in question correctly applies to German in that they fail to capture the meaning of auch nur. I then argue that auch nur marks its host sentence as the most informative among the alternative assertions and discuss how various restrictions on the use of auch nur might come about.

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