Causal necessity and sufficiency in implicativity

Abstract

Karttunen's (1971) implicative verbs are notable for generating inferences over their complements. English "manage to X", for instance, entails the truth of X: the entailment reverses with matrix negation and seems tied to the elusive presuppositional contribution of the implicative predicate (Coleman 1975). Building on Baglini & Francez (2015), and drawing on insights provided by implicative data from Finnish, I propose an account of the implicative class which links the lexical presuppositional content of an implicative verb to inferences over the truth-value of its complement via a model of causal necessity and sufficiency between contextually-salient variables (Schulz 2011). The proposal also provides a natural explanation for the commonalities between "manage" and weaker one-way implicatives like Finnish "jaksaa"(=have.strength), which only entail under one matrix polarity.

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