Past Event: Monday Colloquium: At least, at most revisited (Ana Arregui; University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

Talk Abstract: In this talk I investigate ‘upper-bound’ and ‘lower-bound’ readings of at least/at most-numerals interacting with modals in examples like Alma can have at most two churros and Alma must have at least two churros. Though examples like these have generated considerable interest in the literature, some questions remain. In my talk I will explore a pragmatic account that derived enrichment from assumptions about speaker authority. I will target so-called distributivity effects and missing authoritative interpretations in examples like The password can be at least 10 characters long. Discourse-driven, the account is Gricean in spirit.