Linking scope, exhaustivity and ignorance

Abstract

This paper accounts for a link between scope and epistemic effects of ?hari marked disjunctions/indefinites in Sinhala (Indo Aryan, Sri Lanka) with respect to DPs carrying universal quantificational force. It proposes to derive the wide/narrow scope and related epistemic effects as implicatures by way of exhaustification with respect to alternatives associated with a disjunction/indefinite. A doxastic and an exhaustivity operator placed in the syntactic structure of a ?hari disjunction/indefinite construction serve in deriving the implicatures, following the grammatical approach to derivation of implicatures (cf. Fox, 2007; Chierchia et al., 2012; Meyer, 2013; Nicolae, 2017, a.m.o.).