Linguistics Seminar Talk - Vera Hohaus

Speaker: Vera Hohaus, University of Manchester 

Title: On the Role of Informativity in Semantic Illusion 

Abstract:  

In this talk, we revisit a prominent type of semantic illusion, which has been observed to robustly arise 
in so-called depth-charge sentences like English (1). Unlike the structurally parallel (2), the sentence in (1) may receive an interpretation that corresponds to its counterpart with enough. Under this interpretation, it is taken as a prompt to treat all head injuries, regardless of their size.  

 
(1) No head injury is too insignificant to be ignored.  
↔ No head injury is insignificant enough to be ignored (Wason & Reich 1979) 
(2) No missile is too small to ban.  

 
We propose a compositional analysis of the interpretative differences between (1) and (2), under which they follow from an interaction between monotonicity and maximal informativity (Beck 2013, Fintel, Fox & Iatridou 2014). This interaction also underlies several related cases of apparent illusions, including UNDER-OVER illusions (Smith & Hohaus 2025) and BEFORE-NOT illusions (Krifka 2010).