Answerability Constraints on Alternative-Introducing Salient Sentences: Support from the Evaluativity Effects of Only and from Scalar Implicatures

This chapter examines the ability of salient sentences, namely those which are previously uttered in the discourse, to introduce alternatives to a proposition p. The empirical basis for this examination is two apparently unrelated alternative sensitive phenomena; the presence vs. absence of evaluativity ('smallness') effects of the particle only, and the presence vs. absence of scalar implicatures based on 'complex' salient material. I propose that at least in these cases salient sentences can only be used to introduce alternatives into the set if they obey an answerability-based constraint, i.e., if they answer the same question answered by the sentence denoting p. The proposal is novel, as so far claims in the literature regarding answerability-based constraints concerned the alternatives themselves, and not the salient sentences which can or cannot introduce these alternatives into the set.