On deriving and canceling ignorance

Abstract

The goals of this paper are two. First, it argues for a distribution requirement (DR: ? ¬ p? ? ¬ q, derived with respect to the worlds epistemically accessible to a speaker) to account for the ignorance implicatures (IIs) of -hari and -do marked disjunctions and indefinites in Sinhala (Indo Aryan, Sri Lanka). Second, it claims that the choice of non/cancelation of these IIs does not depend on whether they are conversational or not, but rather on the differences in the positive polarity (PP) behavior (weak vs. strong: cf. Spector, 2014) of the two particles. It casts its proposal in the grammatical approach to derivation of implicatures (cf. Fox, 2007; Chierchia et al., 2012; Meyer, 2013; Nicolae, 2017; a.m.o.).