Aspect and Actuality Entailment: Too and Enough Constructions

Abstract

This paper discusses implicative readings of too and enough constructions (TECs), that is, readings where their complement clause is realized in the actual world. There appears to be a correlation between aspect and implication in these constructions: with perfective aspect, TECs are implicatives, with imperfective, they aren’t. I show that previous analyses cannot handle this aspectual interaction, nor derive implicative readings at all. I propose a new analysis, in which the base meaning of TECs is implicative and non modal, and emerges with perfective aspect, while the non implicative readings of TECs arise with imperfective morphology, which I take to be a reflection of a covert genericity operator.