I’ve written a short, technical paper in response to Jordi Fortuny’s just published Journal of Semantics paper “The Witness Set Constraint”:
von Fintel, Kai. 2016. A problem with Fortuny’s Witness Set Constraint. http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/jdiOWUzY/kvf-witness.pdf.
Here’s what it is about:
A cherished semantic universal is that determiners are conservative (Barwise & Cooper 1981, Keenan & Stavi 1986). Well-known problem cases are only (if it has determiner uses) and certain uses of proportional determiners like many (Westerståhl 1985). Fortuny 2016, in this journal, proposes a new constraint (the Witness Set Constraint) to replace Conservativity. He claims that his constraint is satisfied by only and the Westerståhl-many, thus correctly allowing the existence of these non-conservative determiners, while it is not satisfied by unattested non-conservative determiners (such as allnon). In fact, I show here that only and Westerståhl-many do not satisfy Fortuny’s Witness Set Constraint. Upon reflection, it turns out that the reason is simple: the Witness Set Constraint is in fact equivalent to Conservativity. There simply cannot be non-conservative determiners that satisfy the Witness Set Constraint.
Comments are of course very welcome.