Simple and Phrasal Implicatives

First Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM), pages 124–131, Montr´eal, Canada, June 7-8, 2012. c⃝2012 Association for Computational Linguistics Simple and Phrasal Implicatives Lauri Karttunen Stanford University CSLI, 210 Panama St. Stanford, CA 94305, USA laurik@stanford.edu Abstract This paper complements a series of works on implicative verbs such as manage to and fail to. It extends the description of simple im- plicative verbs to phrasal implicatives as take the time to and waste the chance to. It shows that the implicative signatures of over 300 verb-noun collocations depend both on the se- mantic type of the verb and the semantic type of the noun in a systematic way. 1 Introduction There is a substantial body of literature on the se- mantics of English complement constructions start- ing with (Kiparsky and Kiparsky, 1970) and (Kart- tunen, 1971; Karttunen, 1973), including (Rudanko, 1989; Rudanko, 2002; Nairn et al., 2006; Egan, 2008). These studies have developed a semantic classification of verbs and verb-noun collocations that take sentential complements. They focus on constructions that give rise to implied commitments that the author cannot disavow without being inco- herent or without contradicting herself. For exam- ple, (1a) presupposes that Kim had not rescheduled the meeting, (1b) entails that she didn’t and presup- poses that she intended to reschedule it. (1) a. Kim forgot that she had not rescheduled the meeting. b. Kim forgot to reschedule the meeting. FACTIVE constructions like forget that X involve presuppositions, IMPLICATIVE constructions like forget to X give rise to entailments and may carry presuppositions. Presuppositions persist under negation, in ques- tions and if-clauses, entailments do not. For ex- ample, the negation of (1b), Kim did not forget to reschedule the meeting, entails that Kim did reschedule the meeting and presupposes, as (1b) does, that it was her intention to do so. Implicative constructions involve entailments. The entailment may be positive or negative depend- ing on the polarity of the containing clauses. Replac- ing forget by didn’t forget in (1b) gives an entailment of the opposite polarity. Questions and if-clauses do not yield any entailments. 2 Simple implicatives The constructions forget to X and remember to X are two-way implicative constructions. They yield an entailment about the truth or falsity of X both in af- firmative and in negative sentences. We use the no- tation + − | − + for the verb forget to to indicate that forget to X yields a negative entailment for X in a posi- tive context, +−, and a positive entailment in a negative context, −+. The first sign stands for the polarity of the embedding context, the second sign for the polarity of the entailment. We code the verb remember to as + + | − − because in a positive context remember to X yields a pos- itive entailment about X, ++, and the opposite, −−, in a negative context. There are two major types of implicative construc- tions. TWO-WAY IMPLICATIVES like forget to and re- member to yield an entailment …

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