Revisiting the role of structural complexity in symmetry breaking

Abstract

Many recent theories of strengthening assume following Katzir (2007); Fox and Katzir (2011) that the alternatives used to derive strengthened meanings may be at most as complex as the prejacent. We explore a novel response to several known problems for this view that maintains three of its core assumptions: the selection criterion is (i) structure-based, (ii) indifferent to whether the alternatives form entailment-based scales, and (iii) cannot be overruled by relevance. Contra Fox and Katzir, the crucial structural criterion is not complexity per se, but similarity to the prejacent. Moreover, this property only applies to break stalemates between symmetric alternatives; in the absence of stalemates, alternatives are structurally unconstrained. We suggest that while assumptions (i) and (ii) have good empirical consequences, this account is not entirely successful because (iii) is too strong: In certain special cases, which seem to have an information-structural characterization, stalemates can be broken by relevance.